Dense fog obscured the view. But the explosion on March 30 came through loud and clear on SpaceX’s webcast. About six minutes after launching, the company’s newest Starship prototype exploded mid-air, showering the launch site with metal shards.

Once on the brink of extinction, the California condor will soon return to the skies. Officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on March 23 announced plans to release six condors into Redwood National Park in Northern California every year for the next two decades beginning this fall. If successful, the yearly releases could help repopulate skies over parts of California, Oregon, and Nevada that haven’t seen the massive scavengers for decades.

Californians call it “the Big One”—a massive earthquake capable of destroying an entire city if the San Andreas Fault ruptures in the wrong spot. San Francisco saw such an earthquake in 1906 when a 7.9 temblor destroyed much of the city and killed thousands. Geologists cite the 1857 Fort Tejon quake that registered as a magnitude 7.9 as another.

It’s like turning over a big rock in the garden and seeing all the creepy-crawlies scatter. When an iceberg the size of Nashville broke away from Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf in late February, scientists raced to the Weddell Sea to investigate what had been living under the massive formation.

Until recently, the only black-browed babbler researchers had seen in more than 170 years was a stuffed specimen Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew caught during a survey of the East Indies. But thanks to the efforts of a local birdwatching club, researchers have proof that one of Indonesia’s most enigmatic birds still persists in the wilds of Borneo.

After decades of cooperation between the United States and Russia in space, the Kremlin seems to have found a new interstellar partner. The space agencies for Russia and China on March 9 announced plans to construct a first-of-its-kind moon base dedicated to science. The two countries signed a memorandum bringing Russia into a pre-existing Chinese project to create the International Lunar Research Station at the south pole of the moon.

Scientists are rethinking a famous fossil often used to illustrate the Darwinian story that humans descended from apes. According to a team of researchers led by Texas A&M paleontologist Thomas Cody Prang, the hands and feet of the ancient extinct species known as Ardipithecus ramidus were more suited to a life swinging in trees than walking upright.