In Netflix’s recent thriller Leave the World Behind, a series of catastrophic events plague the film’s characters while on vacation. A tanker ship rams into the coastline, self-driving cars go amuck, and there’s no internet to watch that final episode of your favorite show. As local tragedies unfold, calamities occur further afield — all provoked by an unknown instigator. Has AI or a rogue country hacked into cyberspace? Or consider a solar eruption blasting toward Earth, wreaking havoc around the globe? To find out about this latter plot, we spoke to NASA heliophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta about space weather and missions that monitor and predict extreme geomagnetic storms on Earth.

Agnieszka Lukaszczyk is Vice President of Government Affairs at the Earth-imaging satellite company, Planet. Her job is to help international leaders embrace a satellite constellation’s view of the world. When we spoke to her a year ago, she was pregnant with plans to give birth in her home country Poland. A borderland away, Russian forces had invaded Ukraine. “I was sobbing. I know I’m hormonal, but I was thinking, what kind of world am I bringing my child into?” If someone had a pragmatic answer to her existential question, that person would be the expectant mother herself.