This latest collection of imagery via NASA shows us proof.
In newly released imagery from NASA, planets once seen as distant points of light are fully revealed in extraordinary detail.
Below are the planets in their natural order. The clarity is stunning.
Mercury The smallest planet and closest to the Sun, Mercury is a cratered, airless world that resembles our Moon. With almost no atmosphere, temperatures swing from blistering heat to deep cold. Vast impact basins and ancient lava plains reveal a violent early past.Venus Similar in size to Earth but far harsher, Venus is wrapped in thick clouds of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. A runaway greenhouse effect makes it the hottest planet in the solar system.Earth Our home world is the only known planet with life. Oceans cover most of its surface, and a balanced atmosphere helps maintain stable temperatures.Mars Mars is a cold desert world coated in iron-rich dust that gives it its red color. Giant features like Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris hint at a dramatic geological past.Jupiter The largest planet, Jupiter is a swirling giant of hydrogen and helium. Its colorful bands and the centuries-old Great Red Spot reveal a world of immense storms.Saturn Saturn is famous for its magnificent rings, made of billions of icy fragments. Beneath them lies a vast gas giant with powerful winds and dozens of moons.Uranus Uranus is an icy blue giant tipped dramatically on its side, likely from an ancient collision. Its unusual tilt creates extreme seasons that last decades.Neptune The most distant major planet, Neptune is a deep-blue world of powerful storms and the fastest winds in the solar system.Pluto Once considered the ninth planet, Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet in the distant Kuiper Belt. Despite its small size, it features icy mountains, nitrogen glaciers, and the famous heart-shaped region called Tombaugh Regio. A small world, but a fascinating one.
Vancouver has always had good bones. The mountains, the water, the way the city sits between them like it was planned by someone with an eye for drama. But for all its natural beauty, its skyline has played it relatively safe. That’s about to change, and the agent of disruption is, of all things, a sea sponge.
Henriquez Partners Architects, a local Vancouver studio, has unveiled designs for 595 West Georgia Street, a 1,033-foot tower that will become the city’s first-ever supertall skyscraper. To earn that designation, a building has to exceed 984 feet, which puts 595 West Georgia just barely in that club and makes it a landmark before a single floor has been built. It’s the centerpiece of a larger trio called Georgia & Abbott, developed by Holborn Group, but this one is clearly the main event.
The design draws from the glass sea sponge reefs, specifically hexactinellids, found off the coast of British Columbia. These aren’t the bath sponges you’re picturing. They’re ancient, rare, deep-sea organisms with a crystalline skeletal structure that is simultaneously porous and structurally formidable. Henriquez Partners didn’t just borrow the idea aesthetically; they borrowed it structurally. The building is wrapped in a steel exoskeleton clad in white Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer panelling, with highly translucent spans of glass filling the rest. That external framework carries the structural loads, which means fewer internal columns, more open floor plates, and a surface that looks woven and textured rather than sealed and flat.
That last distinction matters more than it sounds. Glass-box towers have dominated skylines for decades, and while some are genuinely beautiful, most are just reflective. They bounce light around and blend into each other. 595 West Georgia is going for something different: depth. The lattice of the exoskeleton creates shadows and layers depending on where you’re standing and what time of day it is. It moves, visually, in a way that most modern towers simply don’t, which makes looking at it feel more like watching a living surface than a fixed object.
Henriquez Partners described the design as telling “a story that is unique to British Columbia.” That kind of regional specificity is increasingly rare in architecture, where global firms often produce work that could exist in Dubai just as easily as Dallas. The fact that this building could only make sense in Vancouver, because the glass sponge is native to BC’s coastal waters, gives it a conceptual integrity that goes beyond branding. It’s a building that knows where it lives.
The program is equally considered. 595 West Georgia will function as a hotel tower, with conference facilities, a rooftop restaurant, and a publicly accessible observation deck at the top that will be free for Vancouverites to visit. That detail alone shifts the building’s relationship to the city. A supertall designed to be shared with the public rather than sealed off for guests feels like a genuine gesture, and it suggests that the architects and developer thought about this tower as part of the city’s fabric, not just its skyline profile.
The whole project sits at a compelling intersection of ideas. It’s biomimicry applied at an urban scale, which is a growing conversation in both design and engineering. It’s also a statement about what cities are willing to reach for, literally and figuratively. Vancouver has been measured about its height limits for years, and for good reason. The city’s low-rise character has long been part of its identity. Greenlighting a supertall signals that the city is ready to stretch those boundaries, and having one that can argue its design philosophy this clearly makes that shift feel earned.
Whether 595 West Georgia turns out to be as striking in person as the renderings suggest is something only construction can answer. But the foundational idea, that the most interesting path forward might look like something pulled from the ocean floor, is exactly the kind of thinking that makes architecture worth paying attention to right now. Not every city gets to say its most ambitious tower was modeled after an organism that’s been living quietly underwater for centuries. Vancouver gets to say that.
In Perry v. Marteney, (4th Cir., April 8, 2026), the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, held that West Virginia's law that requires children attending school in the state to be vaccinated against a number of infectious diseases may be constitutionally applied to a student attending the state's online public school over the religious objections of the student's parents. West Virginia allows medical exemptions from the vaccination requirement but does not permit religious exemptions. The court rejected the parents' claim that the compulsory vaccination law is not "generally applicable", and thus must satisfy the strict scrutiny test, and also suggested that it does satisfy strict scrutiny. The majority said in part:
... [A] state’s interest in vaccinating its citizens and protecting its school children has long been recognized as of the utmost importance.... This is not just some ho-hum, every day “compelling interest.” Even under the strictest scrutiny, courts should not annul and eviscerate this fundamental state concern merely because a challenged law in some respect falls short of some perceived perfection. And much less is required of neutral and generally applicable laws....
West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination law does not provide a mechanism for granting individualized exemptions. State officials do not have any discretion “to decide which reasons” for refusing vaccination “are worthy of solicitude.”... The law recognizes only one kind of exemption—medical exemptions—and clearly articulates the circumstances in which state officials can grant them....
The Perrys first argue that West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination law is not generally applicable for another reason: it does not apply to other groups that pose a similar hazard to public health.... [T]he vaccine mandate does not apply to: (1) children educated outside of the school system (i.e., educated at home, in learning pods, or in microschools); (2) adults working in schools; or (3) children attending school who have been granted a medical exemption.
It is certainly true that West Virginia’s vaccine mandate could sweep more broadly than it does. But a law does not lack general applicability merely because it makes classifications.... Classifications only pose a constitutional concern if they treat “comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.”
... [T]he Perrys do not allege that K.P.’s desire to attend the Virtual Academy is religiously motivated, so this is merely an instance of West Virginia treating some secular activity more favorably than other secular activity....
The burden imposed by West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination law is not remotely “of the same character” as those imposed in Yoder and Mahmoud. ... The law is a public health measure, not an instrument of ideological indoctrination. It does not expose children to values or beliefs that might be hostile to their parents’ religious beliefs. It does not require that school instruction extoll the virtues of vaccines. All the law requires is that, in the interest of protecting others, children get themselves vaccinated before attending school. The need for some to protect the health and well-being of all was not present in Yoder or Mahmoud.
Judge Neimeyer dissented, saying in part:
The injunction entered here [by the district court] hardly affects West Virginia’s compelling interest in preventing the spread of infectious disease, as the injunction treats virtual students the same as other West Virginia students not physically attending a school while, at the same time, preserving the Perrys’ free exercise rights....
To be sure, West Virginia absolutely has a compelling state interest to prevent the spread of infectious disease in order to protect the health and safety of the public, as the district court acknowledged and the majority emphasizes. But the School Officials have failed to show that the law’s failure to make an exception for virtual students with a sincere religious objection to complying with the mandatory vaccination law is consistent with narrow tailoring when students similarly situated with regard to the risk addressed need not comply at all....
On April 9, 1917, the Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s new 10 hour day law for both men and women that also provided for overtime pay. The Court went away from its usual position as hard-core defenders of contract doctrine, deciding the limited nature of the law meant that the state did not expand its police powers too much and workers could still be exploited if they wanted. This was an important precedent, although it did not mean the Court was moving toward a more liberal position on workers’ rights.
Oregon had led the way on workers’ rights for some time by the 1910s. The Supreme Court was generally hostile to these laws. This was very much the Lochner era. In 1905, the Court had ruled in Lochner v. New York that a law regulating the hours for bakeries was unconstitutional. But it made an exception to this state in 1908. In Muller v. Oregon, the Court ruled that a law specifically in favor of women’s hours was constitutional because women played a special role in the body politic as mothers. This was seen by a certain class of feminist as discriminatory, but labor feminists lauded the decision, understanding that this was not only protecting women from exploitation but opening the door for further advancement in laws limiting working hours.
In 1913, Oregon passed a new law that created a 10-hour day for both men and women. It applied broadly to mills, factories, and manufacturing facilities. But it also included a pioneering time and a half law for overtime, up to 3 hours a day. This was critical, as it turns out, because it kept open the option of workers laboring more, which was a good way to get around the general atmosphere of the era that regulating the workplace was a constitutional violation.
Franklin Bunting ran a flour mill in Lake County, presumably Lakeview since the rest of that county is mountains and scrubland. He hated every part of this new law. So he just refused to comply and sued the state when it fined him $50 for violating it. The state supreme court upheld the law in 1915. Bunting appealed to the Supreme Court. There were a lot of folks invested in Oregon being able to pass such a law. Among them was Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice who would lead the state’s appeal. But Bunting had his major supporters too, including former senator Charles Fulton, a classic Gilded Age Republican who had served a term from the state from 1903-09.
This case was all about contract doctrine. This is the critical labor issue of the era for the courts. In short, going back to the 1830s and then especially after the Civil War, employment was seen as a contract between two willing individuals. So what right did the courts or the state have in adjudicating decisions made by two equal parties? Of course the idea of two equal parties when it came to employment was completely ridiculous and even more so after the Civil War. To say that the millionaire and the starving immigrant were equal parties in a contract of choice is not just to ignore the reality of power dynamics, but to laugh in the face of common sense. And yet, the more unequal the nation became, the more the courts and other hacks for the millionaire elites clung to this idea like it came down on high from God. This all got in the way of all sorts of ways to make work slightly less equal? Workplace safety law? Violation of a worker’s right to labor for higher wages in an unsafe working environment if they wanted. Minimum wage law? Violation of a workers’ right to choose to sell their labor for less money. Child labor laws? Violation of a parent’s right to sell their children’s labor. Etc.
Added to this was the perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment. The same courts who decided cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson or throwing out the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional–i.e., deciding that the 14th Amendment did not actually protect black Americans–decided that in fact that 14th Amendment did protect corporations. They basically wrote this contract ideology into the 14th Amendment. It’s true enough that Reconstruction Era Republicans did have contracts in mind with the 14th Amendment. These people loved contracts and believed the best way to solve the southern labor issue was for ex-slaves to sign contracts with planters that would regulate wages and conditions. And let’s not pretend that most of these guys were pro-labor either, they weren’t. But at the time of writing the 14th Amendment, their vision was very much not providing cover for corporations to ensure that they could exploit their workers and that any laws to protect workers would be ruled unconstitutional on these grounds. But then we should know by now that the courts are filled with hacks who just rewrite the language of the law to support their personal political preferences, with a few exceptions around ideas of principle, sometimes.
The specific argument Bunting and his lawyers made was that the law intervened in the labor market to compel employers to pay more for labor than market value and thus was a wage law rather than an hours law. Oregon countered that it was strictly an hours law and that the very mild penalties on the employer also demonstrated its limited police power. What both sides understood is that an actual law regulating wages would be tossed by the courts in this era.
To some surprise, the Court ruled 5-3 in favor of the state. Louis Brandeis sat out, which is interesting since he was the lawyer whose pioneering use of sociological evidence is what swayed the Court in Muller. Perhaps this is why he sat it out. In any case, Joseph McKenna wrote the majority opinion, with Holmes, Day, Pitney and Clarke joining. White, Van Devanter, and McReynolds each wrote separate dissents. McKenna argued that the state had engaged in appropriate police powers. The key here is that the law did nothing to set wages, outside of the overtime. McKenna noted this specifically. Because this law was just about hours and not wages, it did not discriminate against employers and the contract law could be upheld. Bunting’s lawyers also argued that the law did not even protect the workers from unsafe conditions, which McKenna rejected outright.
This was a positive step for labor reformers. Alas, the Court would continue to rule for employers on most cases for another twenty years and the throwing out of the Washington D.C. minimum wage law for women in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital in 1923 demonstrated that only a revolution on the Court would lead to a scenario in which the law could protect American workers. That happened under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leading to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and it being upheld in U.S. v. Darby in 1941.
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