The barren, rocky highway twists and turns like a cobra that’s downed a fifth of tequila. This is Nowheresville, Spain, a desert land of sand and sky, shrubs and windmills, sun and more sun. The farther you wind along on the seemingly endless road, the more you begin to question whether this was all a mistake. Surely, you think, no church could be worth such a detour. And then you arrive.

When I catch up with Rick Tumlinson, he has just returned from Vienna, where he spoke before the United Nations about the present and future of the commercial space industry. He’s breathless from climbing three flights of stairs — no great height for a space frontiersman — but elated with the response from diplomats in Austria: “They really got it,” he says.

For most of us, the sound of an ice cream truck brings back memories of lazy summer afternoons and children rushing to buy a chocolate cone. But 30 years ago in Scotland, an ice cream van was a sign of danger. Friendly competition is natural among street vendors, but in Glasgow, in the ’80s, ice cream van drivers took things to a whole new level of violence in what came to be known as “the Ice Cream Wars.”

Carolynn “C.J.” Kanelakos is a woman. And she’s a mechanical engineer at the Johnson Space Center. And while some might think these facts make her a bit of a unicorn, she’s never felt particularly exceptional as a female in the sciences.

“Growing up, nobody ever led me to believe there was anything I couldn’t do. Maybe that was a little naive,” she concedes, “but it was kind of nice as well.”

How do you go about turning a 200-pound hunk of wood into a bowl that doubles as a work of art? It takes South African artist Rodney Band about a week in a process that is not only dangerous and compelling to watch, but results in gnarled masterpieces that distill the power of massive trees into delicate vessels.

The dingy classroom at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech reminds me that there was a time when astronomers charted the skies with little more than math and passion. Sophisticated computer models have been developed to catalog pulsars and probe dark matter, but here in Morocco, in a dark room devoid of high-tech gadgetry, Khalid Barkaoui, a 25-year-old doctoral student, distilled data captured by the TRAPPIST-North telescope at the Oukaimeden Observatory that helped paint a picture of three of seven previously unidentified exoplanets.