A Burst of Light

A widely shared quote by Audre Lorde — "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare" — is circulating again. It comes from her book "A Burst of Light," also known as "The Cancer Chronicles," which she wrote while dying of breast cancer in the late 1980s. Readers cite it as a reminder that self-care was originally framed as survival and resistance, not consumer wellness.

Russian media report that the Dragonids, one of autumn's most unpredictable meteor showers, may produce bursts of up to a thousand meteors per hour. Outlets are telling readers where in Russia the display could be visible and when to look up, with observers urged to find dark skies away from city lights.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a G2 moderate geomagnetic storm watch for October 9, raising chances of aurora sightings at unusually low latitudes. Attention is also on a new spacecraft capturing a burst of aurora around the North Pole and the SMILE satellite, which is ending an 18-year gap in X-ray observations of Earth's magnetic shield.

The James Webb Space Telescope has pinpointed the most distant fast radio burst ever detected, a fleeting blast of radio waves from the early universe that more than doubles the previous record. Fast radio bursts are millisecond-long signals, some originating billions of light-years away, and their origins remain one of astronomy's biggest puzzles. Astronomers say the discovery offers a rare chance to study matter in the distant cosmos.