Plus a new science module for the space station, shipwrecks, the Hills Where it is Drawn, and great white sharks. 

#01 UNDERGROUND

+ “The winding streets of old Istanbul are an overlapping cacophony of seagulls, ship horns and vendors of colorful fresh fruit. Shady fig trees cluster near crumbling Byzantine walls and sweeping Ottoman palaces, remnants of the empires that conquered and lost this strategic point on the Bosporus Strait, which formed the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire. Underneath it all is an ancient world that's almost invisible, unless you know where to look.” 

#02 SHIPWRECKED

+ Divers exploring the sunken city of Thônis-Heracleion, in the Egyptian bay of Abū Qīr, have discovered the remains of a military vessel dated to the second century B.C.E.

+ A team of researchers led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is set to begin an autonomous underwater survey of the newly designated Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Michigan, and another area in Lake Ontario, that may receive a similar designation. The project will use three different forms of autonomous vehicles including submersibles, boats, and an aerial vehicle to locate shipwrecks and characterize habitat.

#03 TICKETS FOR TWO

+ Both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have now successfully completed brief joyrides into sub-orbital space, flying with the private rocket companies that they founded. As far as whether or not they will officially be dubbed astronauts or not, well, it's complicated…

#04 SPACE STATION

+ The International Space Station has always primarily been a collaboration between the US and Russia. That has made many people in the industry uneasy as relations between the two countries have frosted in recent years and Russia threatened to pull out of the partnership. However, we all may be able to take a sigh of relief. This week Russia launched the long-delayed Nauka science module, the station's first new module since 2016. The investment in hardware indicates that Russia intends to stick with the station for a while longer. Although, after reaching orbit the module reportedly experienced a number of malfunctions related to sensors and thrusters. It's unclear how serious the issues are.

+ Boeing is set to launch an unmanned Starliner capsule to the space station on July 30th, the last step in the company’s bid to send astronauts to space. This is a re-do of a test in late 2019 that nearly ended in disaster after a string of software issues. Assuming everything goes well, expect to see astronauts stepping into a Starliner before the end of the year.

#05 MARS

+ After landing on Mars five months ago, Perseverance is set to drill its first rock samples. The lipstick-sized rock cylinders will then be hermetically sealed in metal tubes and left on Mars for a future mission to retrieve and return to Earth. Perseverance will likely collect a couple of dozen of such samples over the course of its mission.

+ Mars is generally a quiet place, but that hasn’t stopped the Insight lander from listening to rumblings deep inside the planet for the last three years. Using a sensitive seismometer Insight has detected over 700 Mars-quakes, a surprisingly high number considering Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics like on Earth. By carefully studying those quakes scientists were able to directly measure the structure of Mars’s interior, providing another data point to better understand the formation and evolution of rocky planets like our own.

#06 SOLAR SYSTEM

+ An Israeli company secured funding to try to land on the moon again after a failed attempt in 2019.

+ A spacecraft called Lucy is nearing completion by Lockheed Martin. Lucy will launch later this year and travel to the Trojan asteroids, a group of asteroids in stable orbits near Jupiter thought to be remnants from the formation of the solar system.

+ The Hubble Space Telescope has returned to normal science operations after experiencing a computer issue that took it offline for a month.

#07 RETRACTION

+ Sometimes a new discovery isn’t really that new. Last year we featured an article about an impressive collection of rock art in Columbia, reported by The Guardian as being 12,000 years old and “newly discovered.” As is the case surprisingly often in these scenarios, people in the area knew about it all along. The name of the national park where the largest murals are located is Chiribiquete, meaning “hills where it is drawn”. The murals have been taken care of by the local community for decades and often studied by Columbian scientists. Although the peer-reviewed research that led to the headlines did find new evidence that the area had been inhabited for up to 12,000 years, it didn’t make any conclusions about the age of the murals themselves and certainly wasn’t represented properly in the media narrative at the time.  

#08 JAWS

+ Beachside communities on Cape Cod are learning to share the water with a resurgent population of great white sharks. Sharks were largely extirpated from the region in the last century, but increased seal numbers have lured them back in. Encouragingly for conservationists, communities have leaned towards coexistence through modifying human behavior and deployment of new technology to sense if a shark is in the water, rather than killing off animals.

#09 A GOOD BOOK

+ Theodore Roosevelt had many identities during his lifetime. In Theodore Roosevelt In the Field, Michael Canfield focuses on the 26th president's naturalist tendencies and repeated trips into the field. Roosevelt's strong desire to learn through direct experience and observation is apparent in adventures like his years spent ranching in the Dakota badlands, a short but adventurous military career in Cuba, and an African safari after leaving the presidency. Indeed, his life can be told as one large adventure yarn. But a major takeaway from this book is that you don't need to constantly be on safari to appreciate nature. From taking measurements of a seal as a child all the way up to recording bird sightings on the White House lawn, Roosevelt consistently appreciated nature and made a habit of writing down what he saw. Canfield even includes high-quality scans of Roosevelt’s field notes throughout the book which really brought the stories to life. Regardless of what you think of Roosevelt (he did do a lot of hunting considering his conservation legacy), it’s clear that his life was shaped by the field. This biography is an excellent way to explore that aspect of his personality. 

“Roosevelt’s achievements had not simply grown from independent areas of mastery. Rather, his was a synthetic persona that had been nourished by his underlying motivation to take to the field for adventure – as natural historian, writer, rancher, soldier, explorer, conservationist, and world leader – with elements that flowed like independent streams, rivulets, and gushing tributaries into one charging river. This force of nature had been grown from Roosevelt's robust, forceful, naturalistic, bombastic… persona, which had been born and bred in the field.”

That's all for this week! You can respond to this email to tell me about anything you liked or didn't like, tell me about a project you're working on, or suggest a story. You might also forward this email to a friend so they can subscribe too!

- Evan Hilgemann