Look up to the sky for streaking meteors and fireballs: The Orionid meteor shower is expected to peak overnight tonight, Space.com reports.
Driving the news: There’s expected to be relatively little moonlight to get in the way of spotting “spectacular displays of up to 80 meteors an hour,” the website notes.
The third straight La Niña winter in the U.S. is likely to cause drought to expand and deepen from California to the Plains, branching out across the Southeast, NOAA said Thursday.
How it works: Currently, water levels along certain stretches of the Mississippi River are so low that centuries-old shipwrecks are being revealed, and modern-day barge traffic is imperiled.
Driving the news: Seattle marked its second consecutive day of having the worst air quality in the world Thursday, according to its air quality index (AQI).
Isaac Newton used prisms to break down the components of light into the spectrum of colors we see. Those experiments inspire abstract artist Alteronce Gumby in his paintings, made with tiny shards of glass and gemstones, that are his own analysis of light and color.
The big picture: Color frames the world we see. Gumby — whose first solo show, The Color in Everything, is currently up at the Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York City — seeks to redefine color, for the eye and for our society.
Science was front and center in Chinese President Xi Jinping's address to the Communist Party Congress on Sunday, reiterating the country's aspirations and potential paths to becoming a global science and tech powerhouse.
The big picture: "Science and tech is the most important aspect of China’s overall desire to be self-reliant," says Kit Conklin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoTech Center. "It fuels everything."
New studies, missions and rich data about asteroids are giving scientists a sharper picture of the solar system's history.
Why it matters: Asteroids are leftovers from the dawn of the solar system that carry a record of the materials that built planets. They could help piece together how the solar system formed — and how life-generating water arrived on Earth.
