Nell Greenfield Boyce

And Isaacman has said that it's vital for a U.S.

landing to happen before a rival, China, gets astronauts to the lunar surface.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

Jared Isaacman is a businessman who flew to space twice in SpaceX capsules.

On one of those flights, he and a crewmate opened up a hatch and performed the first private spacewalk.

President Trump nominated him to lead NASA, but then abruptly withdrew that nomination in the spring, only to re-nominate him in November.

Isaacman is becoming administrator as NASA prepares to send astronauts on a trip around the moon next year.

making it the first time people have gone there in more than a half century.

The hardware needed for landing on the moon, however, is still in development, and Isaacman has said that it's vital for a U.S.

landing to happen before a rival, China, gets astronauts to the lunar surface.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

The palm-like plants, called cycads, live in the tropics.

They make pollen and seeds in long pinecone-like structures, and the plant can heat these cones up.

In the journal Science, researchers report that the nocturnal beetles that pollinate these plants...

have antennae that are specially designed to sense heat.

And experiments with a fake cone that heated up showed that the beetles would home in on the source of the infrared radiation.

The researchers say that long before colorful flowers emerged to attract later insects like bees and butterflies, plants were using an infrared glow to attract poor-sighted pollinators that were active at night.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

The annual Geminid meteor shower happens when the Earth passes through a field of tiny particles left behind by an asteroid.

That debris hits our atmosphere and produces bright streaks of light.