NASA's 'worm' logo is back. But why did it disappear? - CNN | Canada News Media
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NASA's 'worm' logo is back. But why did it disappear? – CNN

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Written by Jacopo Prisco, CNN

The worm is back. NASA’s sleek and wavy logo from the 1970s is set to make its return on a SpaceX Falcon 9 scheduled to launch in May — the first to carry astronauts to the International Space Station from American soil since 2011.

While NASA says there’s “a good chance” the worm logo will pop up again in the future, the organization’s official logo remains the “meatball” design introduced a year after the agency was established, in 1959, and replaced by the worm from 1975 until 1992.

NASA’s official logo “the meatball” was first introduced in 1959 Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

The two logos couldn’t be more different. The meatball has a round shape (hence the nickname) and is filled with references to space and flight, such as a planet, stars and an orbital path — a far more literal interpretation of their activities than the minimalistic worm, introduced in 1975 as part of a wider overhaul of federal agency graphics instigated by Richard Nixon’s administration. Though it’s popular in the branding and design industries, as well as with Gen Xers who grew up with it, the logotype was met internally with skepticism and quickly slapped with its derogatory nickname.

“I think the big problem was how it was announced,” said Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian, over the phone. “It was developed by a very small team and only a few people at NASA knew anything about it. Many found out the old logo was being obliterated when new letterhead paper was shipped to them from headquarters, with no further explanations. People were just incensed.”

The logo was the work of two young designers, Bruce Blackburn and Richard Danne, who had recently opened a firm in New York. In a 2015 interview, Blackburn said they set out to create something “very simple, very direct; otherworldly, unexpected, something that you would remember, for sure.”

That simplicity was at odds with the explicit symbolism of the meatball, with its blue planet and stars. It also suggested, perhaps unwittingly, a political agenda.

NASA technicians prepare to attach part of a lifting sling to the right rear of the Space Shuttle Discovery Credit: Bruce Weaver/AFP/Getty Images

NASA’s “worm” logo Credit: NASA

“One of the reasons why the Nixon administration wanted to change NASA’s logo was that they wanted to change NASA’s mission itself, to make it a generalized problem solving agency and contribute more to the economy — which would mean less space exploration,” Barry said. “The worm was intentionally designed without any stars or any aircraft in it, but just letters, because NASA could then be anything you wanted it to be, including not a space agency.”

The worm stuck around for 17 years, but it wasn’t popular internally. NASA’s own history book on its logos, “Emblems of Exploration: Logos of the NACA and NASA,” describes its acceptance within the agency as “far from universal,” and notes that many longtime NASA employees were dismayed by the replacement of their beloved meatball, leading to a “raging controversy.”

Eventually, the worm was retired almost overnight in 1992 by a newly appointed NASA administrator, Daniel Goldin, who thought the resurrection of the old logo from the moon landings would help boost morale.

Closeups of Gemini 8 Command Pilot Neil A. Armstrong Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“Remember, this is just a few years after the Challenger accident and the failed launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Goldin was brought in to fix problems, especially the morale of the workforce, which was in the pits,” said Barry.

At the time, Goldin said it was the men and women of NASA who ordered the return of the old insignia. But there was also the fact that he hated the worm logo. According to Barry, his disdain was so notorious that staff at NASA centers would go on “worm purges” in preparation of his visits.

“The administrator simply did not want to see it, period,” said Ted Huetter, a space historian who worked at NASA during the Goldin era. “That seemed reasonable at first, but then it just got a little weirder, to the point that there would be a scramble to make sure that his path was not going to intersect any worm.”

Thankfully for design buffs, NASA’s current administrator, Jim Bridenstine, who announced the return of the worm on Twitter in early April, views the logo differently, having grown up “inspired by NASA missions during the era of the NASA worm.”

Group portrait of Apollo 11 lunar landing mission astronauts (left to right) Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin Jr. in spacesuits Credit: NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

While the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch will mark the logo’s return to public prominence, the worm never truly went away. Even after adopting the meatball as its official symbol, NASA has continued to use it on clothing and souvenir items, and in one prominent location Goldin wasn’t able to purge.

“Ironically enough, one of the places where the worm remained and still is today is right in the NASA headquarters building, nine floors below Goldin’s office,” said Barry.

“And it’s still there, because it’s carved into granite.”

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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