First, we crack open some fossils, peer back into ancient seas, and look up at lunar skies to find that a year is not quite as fixed as we thought it was. Then, a deafening sex orchestra hits the East Coast—billions and billions of cicadas crawl out of the ground, sing their hearts out, then mate and die. And we end 200 miles above Earth's surface, where astronaut Dave Wolf—rocketing through the blackness of Earth's shadow at five miles per second—floated out of the Mir Space Station on his very first spacewalk.