Pundits have been drawing comparisons between President Donald Trump and President Richard Nixon for basically as long as Trump has been in office, and especially since Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, but those comparisons don’t usually come from Trump himself.

An exception came on Sunday when President Trump tweeted, in light of news that White House Counsel Don McGahn had met with Mueller’s team, that McGahn wasn’t a “John Dean type ‘RAT’” because he wasn’t testifying behind the back of the White House.

Dean, as Nixon’s White House Counsel, played a key role — by deciding to cooperate with prosecutors — in events leading up to the President’s resignation in 1974. Tapes validated his Senate Watergate Committee testimony about the President’s role in the attempt to cover up the break-in at the Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee; Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for his role in the cover-up and spent four months in confinement at Fort Holabird.

“I certainly didn’t want to commit any crimes,” he told TIME in a Tuesday afternoon phone call, “and I wish that I had had somebody I could draw on or somebody’s experience I could have drawn on.”

As it turns out, there was somebody who could draw on his experience — namely, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who on Tuesday pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance violations and making false financial statements, and made statements under oath about his actions during the Trump campaign. Cohen’s plea came on the same day that a jury found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty of eight counts of bank and tax fraud related to his work as a political consultant abroad. Dean spoke to TIME about his reaction to that news and what he thinks of his own return to the headlines. Below is the transcript, edited for clarity, of that conversation.

When Michael Cohen appeared in court to plead guilty today, he stated that he arranged payments made to two women who alleged they’d had affairs with then-candidate Donald Trump “at the direction of the candidate” in order to influence the election. What’s your reaction to that?

He has pretty much identified the President as a criminal. He said he did it at his behest. If [Trump] weren’t President, he probably would be named as a co-conspirator and indicted.

What does that mean for the comparisons to Watergate?

It’s conspiracy. Watergate was a conspiracy. This is a campaign conspiracy.

In other news from today, what’s your reaction to the Manafort trial verdict?

It’s not surprising. It’s clear that jury went carefully through the case. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were somewhat affected by the speed with which the judge forced the prosecution to put [the trial] on, [which] made some of it confusing to them, but they seemed to get the big issues. They got the bank fraud, understood that. It’s an opening shot by the Special Counsel. It really sets up the situation that Manafort was in.

What did you think of Trump calling you a rat for your role in exposing the Watergate cover-up?

That just didn’t surprise me at all. Every day, he throws invective at somebody. I was trying to be the honest guy and stop all this nonsense of spinning and lying and twisting history. I was more distressed or annoyed by him calling the true public servants who have taken salary cuts to go to work for Bob Mueller “thugs.” That’s just so uncalled for. These are men who are committed to the rule of law, who are doing the honorable thing. It’s just disappointing coming out of the President of the United States. He’s just denigrating the office every day he’s there.

In recent weeks, and especially after this weekend’s tweet, you’ve found yourself back in the headlines for something that happened decades ago. How does it feel to have basically gone viral?

It’s not surprising. It’s a culmination of what’s been going on. I didn’t know when Michael Cohen was going to plead or work a deal out, but I knew it was imminent because I was talking to his lawyer Lanny Davis, whom I know personally, and he was picking my brain as to what had happened and how it had all happened back during Watergate. He knows that subject pretty well so he was just refreshing his recollection. I wasn’t giving legal advice, just historical information.

Since you and McGahn and Cohen were all in the position of being the President’s lawyer in some way, though in very different situations, one of the questions that has come up is how attorney-client privilege might apply. In McGahn’s situation in particular, since that was how the President drew you in, how do you think that legal concept applies?

McGahn is certainly drawing the right lessons from what I went through. One of the interesting things that was resolved because of Watergate is the whole issue of when a lawyer represents an institution or organization, who the client is. And it’s not the constituents of the organization or entity or whatever you describe it as. It is, rather, the organization itself. So in this instance, they made it very clear that he represents the office of the president and not the man who occupies the office, and there’s a huge difference. Attorney-client privilege certainly runs to his private counsel, but in most instances, does not run to his government counsel. While Trump can obviously hire and fire any lawyer he wants, it’s not likely a public-employee lawyer is going to bear down on him like a private counsel might because I don’t think Trump is the kind of client that most people would recognize who opens up and really tells them what’s going on. I suspect John Dowd [Trump’s former personal attorney] really has not a clue exactly what Trump did and didn’t do.

What happened is Richard Nixon, who is extremely competent, really bungled Watergate and never hired a lawyer who knew how to advise him. [Nixon] didn’t draw on eminent local Washington defense lawyers and Trump has done the same. It’s amazing. Nixon finally hired a good lawyer after he left office. He hired Jack Miller, who had been the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department. But it was too late.

What do you think will happen next?

It’s not clear, unlike Watergate, how the public is going to become educated about all this. There is really no equivalent to the Senate Watergate Committee. The Republicans just won’t set it up. They don’t want to inform the public about this. So as long as they control the House and Senate they’re not going to. Let’s say the House goes Democratic after the election, I suspect we will learn through a combination of oversight committees, if not [by] reinvigorating the intelligence committee of the House under Adam Schiff. It’s really important that the public understands this. That really happens best when you get live witnesses in front of the House and Senate explaining these things.

Mueller’s doing a counterintelligence investigation which properly shouldn’t be made public. It involves a lot of sources and methods that could put a lot of people’s lives and their families in jeopardy by revealing what we know about what the government has learned of Russia’s activities. But it’s vital, and the fact that Trump is doing everything to inhibit that is again unspeakable.

Is there anything you learned during that time that would useful for people to keep in mind as this news develops?

It’s early. Watergate went on for years, and it takes time for the public to one, learn, two, even get interested in learning, and three, react. That’s one of the things that Watergate certainly teaches us.

What’s very useful and what got me through the whole matter was my belief that the truth ultimately prevails.

Ever wanted to take a peek inside an underground particle accelerator? Want your favorite British actor to walk you through the origin of the universe? While you can’t stick your head into the Large Hadron Collider, you can now go for a short walk around it — and explore other scientific marvels, thanks to Google’s new online invention exhibition project, part of its Arts & Culture platform. With AR apps, AI-powered image galleries, and first-person views of underground science facilities, you might encounter more than a few surprising origin stories concerning mankind’s most ambitious discoveries.

The star here is Google’s new Street View-powered tour of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the famous CERN-run particle accelerator. It’s part of Google’s larger Once Upon a Try project cataloging the stories and origins of various objects, inventors, and discoveries. “With over 400 interactive collections, it’s the largest online exhibition about inventions and discoveries ever created,” says Liudmila Kobyakova, Program Manager at Google Cultural Institute.

The ring-shaped LHC is comprised of a series of superconducting magnets — chilled to a brisk −271.25 °C — that accelerate particles destined to smash into each other. It’s part of CERN’s particle accelerator complex housed beneath the France-Switzerland border.

While you won’t be able to walk through the LHC’s entire 27-kilometer ring, the Street View segments available offer glimpses of the most interesting parts of the particle-smashing facility, according to physicist Rolf Landua, head of CERN’s Education Group. In addition to the LHC, CERN’s collection of images and interactive exhibits available on Google’s platform includes Street View looks at other, smaller particle accelerators. “Clearly, our flagship program is the LHC, so we have chosen to show the collider itself, and the four major experiments in the four collision points (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb),” says Landua. “In my view, the LHC and the four detectors are masterpieces of engineering.”

The data gathered from the LHC’s high-speed collisions allows physicists to test out various theories concerning the structure of the world and the laws of physics. “ATLAS and CMS can take 40 million ‘snapshots’ of collisions per second, creating a primary data rate of more than 1 Petabyte per second,” says Landua. Most notably, tests conducted in the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 revealed the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson particle. The LHC is currently undergoing an upgrade to improve its likelihood of detecting as-yet-unseen subatomic particles.

For those uninterested in particle physics, you’ll be able to peruse other interactive exhibitions. Google and CERN have also created an augmented reality app (narrated by actor Tilda Swinton) exploring the origins of the universe, starting with the Big Bang. NASA’s Visual Universe, meanwhile, uses Google’s machine learning technology to sort and analyze over 127,000 images from the space agency’s image archives, making it easier to comb through the database.

You can also browse through various collections of digitized artwork, images, and articles about pivotal discoveries and inventors provided by institutions like CERN and The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

What do Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama Michelle Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio and David Bowie have in common? Thanks to researchers at the University of Vermont, they all have a new species of spider named after them.

Researchers gave the celebrity names to a group of tiny yellow spiders originally thought to be the same species. The Spintharus berniesandersi, for instance, is a tiny spider found in Cuba that measures just a millimeter long.

Professor Ingi Agnarsson, who led the research project, explained to Sci-News why they gave the eight-legged creatures such recognizable names: “The students and I wanted to honor people who stood up for both human rights and warned about climate change — leaders and artists who promoted sensible approaches for a better world.”

“Until now, the beautiful yellow smiley-faced spiders in the genus Spintharus— named for a smiley face pattern on their abdomens — has been thought to have one widespread species from northern North America down to northern Brazil,” Agnarsson added. But the study, published on Tuesday in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reveals that the spiders are actually many different types of species.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and former president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani with “massive fraud.”

Theranos, a blood testing company, claimed that it could perform a wide-range of laboratory tests using just a finger prick’s worth of blood. The company was founded in 2003 by then-19-year-old Holmes, a Stanford dropout who was once seen as a Silicon Valley wunderkind.

The claims, if true, would have been revolutionary. Investors poured money into Theranos. The company was once valued at $9 billion.

The SEC settled with Theranos and Holmes, who did not deny or admit the allegations. In the settlement, which is subject to court approval, she will pay a “$500,000 penalty, be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years, return the remaining 18.9 million shares that she obtained during the fraud, and relinquish her voting control of Theranos by converting her super-majority Theranos Class B Common shares to Class A Common shares,” according to the SEC complaint.

The commission is pursuing charges against Balwani, who left the company in 2016, in federal district court in Northern California.

Why were Theranos, Holmes and Balwani charged?

“The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday charged Silicon Valley-based private company Theranos Inc., its founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and its former president Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani with raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they allegedly exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance,” according to the SEC complaint.

The SEC alleges that Theranos made misleading media statements, investor presentations and more claiming that its blood testing technology (a machine known as the Edison) could perform far more laboratory tests than it really could. In reality, investors said, the company used traditional testing methods and machines built by other companies.

Additionally, the complaint charged that the company claimed its technology was used by the U.S. Department of Defense on the ground in Afghanistan. A presentation also boasted that Theranos was expected to “generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014.”

The DOD never used Theranos, the complaint states, and the 2014 revenue was actually around $100,000.

Theranos gave the following statement to Forbes regarding the SEC charges: “The Company is pleased to be bringing this matter to a close and looks forward to advancing its technology.”

What’s the background in all of this?

The SEC spent over two years investigating the company after a 2015 Wall Street Journal story called the Theranos technology into question.

Reporter John Carreyrou, troubled by the company’s secrecy in a New Yorker article, investigated the company’s claims. His reporting alleged that the company was not using its signature technology to do the majority of the tests that it advertised — but was using traditional machines. Former employees who spoke to Carreyrou also reportedly worried about the accuracy of the signature technology, the Edison.

In 2016, after an investigation the company’s Newark, California lab, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a notice saying that “it was determined that the deficient practices of the laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”

In 2016, the company told regulators that it voided two years worth of tests, according the Wall Street Journal.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid revoked the company’s license to run the lab, and placed sanctions on Holmes forbidding her from owning or operating a lab for two years.

Theranos settled with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, in 2017. Theranos agreed to stay out of the blood testing business for two years in exchange for a smaller monetary penalty ($30,000) and the withdrawing of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid “revocation of the Theranos’ CLIA operating certificates,” according to Reuters.

In 2017, the company settled with Walgreens, which once partnered with the lab. It also settled a suit with a former backer, the hedge fund Partner Fund Management, which had invested millions in the company in 2014.

Almost as soon as Norma Jeane Dougherty signed a contract with 20th Century Fox on August 24, 1946, the search for her new stage name was underway…

It’s been 72 years since studio executive Ben Lyon suggested she change her name to Marilyn Monroe, the actress whose name became synonymous with blonde bombshells she played in films.

And now her fans can see — and even own — proof of the origins of her name.

The above photograph — inscribed by Marilyn Monroe to Lyon: “Dear Ben, You found me, named me and believed in me when no one else did. My thanks and love forever. Marilyn” — will be on display at The Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, beginning this Saturday Aug. 18 until Sep. 30. The photo of the duo, taken during the filming of The Seven Year Itch (1955), is expected to hit the auction block at the end of October. Considered to be one of the most important photographs in Hollywood history because it debunks myths about how she got her iconic stage name, it could fetch more than $100,000, according to Profiles in History CEO Joseph Maddalena, who runs the auction house that specializes in Hollywood memorabilia. He said photos autographed by Monroe usually fetch between $20,000 and $30,000.

So how was the name Marilyn Monroe chosen?

It was a team effort, according to one account of how it happened by Monroe biographer Donald Spoto. At the time, Lyon thought there were too many possible pronunciations of “Dougherty,” the surname of her soon-to-be ex-husband. The 20-year-old model — who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson and later baptized Norma Jeane Baker — suggested Monroe, another surname on the mother’s side of the family, while Lyon came up with Marilyn because she reminded him of Marilyn Miller, the Ziegfeld Follies Broadway musical star who starred with him and W.C. Fields in Her Majesty, Love. (Miller and Lyon were also thought to have been romantically involved at one point ) It would be apt that the two performers would share the same name, in more ways than one. Spoto points out that not only were they similar on the surface — both blonde in appearance — but also because they both had complicated personal lives, including failed marriages.

It would also end up being an eerily prescient name choice because Miller died at 37, while Monroe died at 36.

But the story doesn’t end there, as many people continued suggesting other names before she settled on Marilyn Monroe. In an Oct. 1946 letter to a friend, she wrote that Clare Norman was also being considered as a screen name, and the names “Meredith” and “Carol Lind” were also reportedly floated, according to another Monroe biographer Lois Banner.

Marilyn Monroe clearly won out. However, it would be another decade before she legally changed her name to her stage name, which was in Feb. 23, 1956 (four months before she would marry Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller).

Correction: Sep. 5

The original version of this article misstated the name that appeared on the Aug. 24, 1946, contract with 20th Century FOX. It was Norma Jeane Dougherty, not Marilyn Monroe.

No one makes news like Elon Musk makes news. That’s what happens when you’re the founder of a rocket company, a co-founder of an electric car and solar panel company, a co-founder of PayPal and, not for nothing, have an actual movie superhero—Iron Man—based partly on you. So when Elon Musk says he’s going to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from the very same launch pad that sent the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, he’s going to get a little attention.

That’s exactly the big event Musk is touting Tuesday. The rocket he’s preparing to launch is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, long delayed but finally ready for liftoff. It’s currently sitting on Cape Canaveral’s historic Pad 39A, with its first launch window opening at 1:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 6, and closing at 4 p.m. When launched, Falcon Heavy will carry a cherry red Tesla Roadster with a dummy wearing a SpaceX spacesuit in the driver’s seat. If all goes well, the Roadster will eventually be placed into orbit around the sun, because, well, why not?

“Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks,” Musk wrote on Instagram. “That seemed extremely boring. . . . We decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel.”

That’s the showman part of Musk. But what about the rocket man? Does the Falcon Heavy launch matter as much as all the hype suggests? Maybe.

Musk is telling the stone truth when he says his Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world. It will pack up to 5.5 million lbs. (2.5 million kg) of thrust in its first stage, and will be able to lift 141,000 lbs. (64,000 kg) of payload to low-Earth orbit (LEO). That makes it more than twice as powerful as its two main competitors, the Delta IV and the Atlas V. It can lift more than twice as much as those rockets too.

But while the Falcon Heavy is the biggest rocket at large today, it’s by no means the biggest that ever was. NASA’s venerable Saturn V moon rocket had a staggering 7.5 million lbs. (3.4 million kg) of thrust at launch and the power to put 261,000 lbs. (118,000 kg) to LEO. NASA has plans to beat even that. The prosaically named Space Launch System (SLS), the agency’s next generation heavy lift rocket, is designed to pack 9 million lbs (4 million kg) of punch and lift 290,000 lbs. (132,000 kg).

The catch is that the Saturn V was mothballed in 1973, while the first SLS won’t fly until 2019—if then—and it will initially be a smaller version than the final heavy-lift model. That does leave the Falcon Heavy as the likely soon-to-be reigning champ.

So Musk has size on his side. Does he also have price? He claims he does. The Atlas V costs about $109 million per launch, depending on cargo and insurance rates; the bigger Delta IV can go for up to $400 million. Musk boasts of prices starting at $90 million for his rocket.

The Falcon Heavy’s lower price tag comes thanks to some money-saving features. SpaceX reuses its empty boosters, landing them on pads back on solid Earth or on floating barges and then recycling them for future launches. The company has also streamlined its production methods. Rather than producing a bunch of different engines with a bunch of different horsepower ratings, SpaceX has just one, the Merlin. The more powerful a rocket has to be, the more Merlins are bundled into its first stage.

If Musk can deliver heavy lift at a low price, he could energize the entire rocketry sector, bringing the much-touted power of commercial competition to an industry that has been able to fatten up on a consistent diet of defense contracts without having to innovate much. More important, heavy-lift boosters are technology you can use not just to get to Earth orbit, but to get out of it too, pressing on to deep-space destinations like the moon and Mars.

There are a few big obstacles that must be overcome for that kind of success to be realized, however. Low prices for big rockets have been promised before. When NASA was first designing the space shuttle, it predicted it could slash the cost-per-pound of carrying payload to orbit to less than $700, corrected for inflation. The actual price wound up being closer to $27,000 per pound.

Musk himself is another reason to be skeptical. His taste for showmanship has seen him promise all kinds of things in the past and then either walk them back or just stop talking about them altogether. Remember in early 2017 when he said he would send two paying astronauts on a trip around the moon and back at the end of 2018? No? He’s probably just as happy if you don’t. Ditto his plan to start colonizing Mars by 2024. The Falcon Heavy, which is already sitting on the pad and ready to to fly, is much more than just happy-talk. But the promises of affordability still have to be met.

Then there’s the design of the rocket, especially those bundled Merlins. SpaceX’s initial test rockets flew on just one Merlin. The workhorse of the fleet is the Falcon 9 which, as its name implies, uses a cluster of nine engines. The Falcon Heavy uses three of those clusters. That’s 27 first stage engines in total compared to the Saturn V’s five, the SLS’s four and the Delta IV’s three. The Atlas V, which can be configured with different numbers of first stage engines, maxes out at six. The more engines you have, the greater the risk of any one of them breaking down or blowing up and igniting the whole bundle. Acoustic resonance—basically out of control vibrations—also increases as the engine count climbs. Wonder how messy an accident with a rocket like that can get? Consider the Soviet Union’s heavy-lift N-1 booster, the country’s intended answer to the Saturn V. The vehicle packed 30 engines into its first stage and, during a launch attempt in 1969 — just 17 days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon — it all blew up, causing the largest non-nuclear explosion ever unleashed by humankind.

The Falcon Heavy is unlikely to come to such an end. The only good thing about failures like the N-1 is that they are learning experiences, teaching designers how to avoid similar catastrophes in the future. But there are a thousand other, less dramatic ways that things could come undone. If the Falcon Heavy does launch, it’s likely to be a grand, rollicking show. Whether the new rocket can deliver more than just live-streamed thrills will not be known for a while.

Elon Musk‘s private spacefaring company SpaceX had a milestone rocket launch Tuesday, making its inaugural Falcon Heavy flight with a special payload: A red Roadster made by the other transportation company Musk runs, Tesla.

The Falcon Heavy is now the world’s most powerful operational rocket, a major achievement given SpaceX is a private firm rather than a government agency, like NASA or the ESA. The Falcon Heavy’s successful launch is an encouraging sign for SpaceX and Musk’s lofty ambitions to one day put humans on Mars.

Such a goal remains years away. But Musk still managed to use the Falcon Heavy launch to put one of his electric cars into space. Strapped in the Tesla’s seats was a mannequin wearing a spacesuit nicknamed “Starman,” a reference to the David Bowie classic.

“It’s kind of silly and fun, but silly and fun things are important,” Musk said at a news conference following SpaceX’s successful Falcon Heavy launch.

Starman is expected to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years. Take a look at some of the photos of him driving in space with a Tesla, courtesy SpaceX’s cameras on board the car.

In terms of direct deaths attributable to the accident, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster turned out to be anything but a highly destructive force. Whereas the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed close to 200,000 immediate victims — more than 100,000 killed and the rest injured — the Chernobyl explosion caused 2 immediate deaths and 29 deaths from acute radiation sickness in the course of the next three months. Altogether, 237 people were airlifted from Chernobyl to Moscow and treated in the special clinic there. Out of these, 134 showed symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. It has been claimed that a total of 50 people died of acute radiation syndrome, and that 4,000 may die in the future of radiation-related causes. But the ultimate Chernobyl mortality toll, though difficult to estimate, may yet turn out to be significantly higher. Current estimates place it between the 4,000 deaths estimated by United Nations agencies in 2005 and the 90,000 suggested by Greenpeace International.

In Ukraine, in the first five years after the disaster, cases of cancer among children increased by more than 90 percent. During the first twenty years after the accident, approximately 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer were registered in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus among those who were younger than eighteen at the time of the explosion. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 5,000 cancer deaths were related to the Chernobyl accident, but this figure is often challenged by independent experts. In Ukraine in 2005, 19,000 families were receiving government assistance owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to be related to the Chernobyl accident. Other consequences include genetic damage to people born after the disaster. Scientists are particularly concerned about cases of microsatellite instability (MSI), a condition that affects the ability of DNA to replicate and repair itself, which has been detected in children whose fathers were exposed to radiation after the accident. Similar changes were found earlier among children of Soviet soldiers who absorbed radiation during nuclear tests.

The cost of the disaster was enormous, and all three East Slavic countries had to deal with it in one way or another. They adopted largely similar formulas, defining the most contaminated areas whose inhabitants were in need of resettlement or assistance and then establishing categories of citizens who were considered to have been most severely affected, making them eligible for financial compensation and privileged access to medical facilities. Altogether close to 7 million people would receive some form of compensation for the effects of the Chernobyl fallout. But the size of the groups eligible for subsidies and the amount of financial compensation differed in the three states, depending on the interplay of politics and economic circumstances.

Russia’s oil and gas riches helped it deal with the post-Chernobyl crisis, while resource-poor Ukraine and Belarus had nothing comparable. Those two countries introduced a special Chernobyl tax in the early 1990s, amounting in Belarus to 18 percent of all wages paid in the nonagricultural sector. In general, however, the Belarusian government dealt with the enormous challenge by continuing the Soviet tradition of suppressing investigations of major disasters. Although Belarus was the post-Soviet country most affected by Chernobyl fall-out, its antinuclear movement never attained the proportions of its Ukrainian counterpart. Nor did the Belarusian Popular Front exercise influence comparable to that of the Ukrainian Rukh. The Belarusian parliament and government lacked the political will and, more importantly, the resources to admit the full scope of the disaster and deal effectively with its consequences. In 1993, the Belarusian parliament adopted laws reducing the levels of soil contamination considered dangerous for human habitation. Even then, with significantly less territory and population covered by social welfare laws, the government only managed to allocate less than 60 percent of the funds approved by legislators for Chernobyl-related programs.

When it comes to Western assistance, Ukraine got most of the attention and resources, largely because it inherited the Chernobyl nuclear plant and its devastated Unit 4. The first priority identified by Ukraine as requiring Western help after the closure of the Chernobyl plant was the construction of a new shelter over the sarcophagus that had been hastily built to cover the damaged fourth reactor in the first months after the explosion. The Ukrainian government announced an international competition for the construction of the new shelter in 1992. In June 1997, the G-7 countries pledged $300 million toward the realization of the project, whose total cost was then estimated at $760 million. A special Chernobyl Shelter Fund was created at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to collect the rest of the funds. That turned out to be a major challenge.

Originally, it was expected that the new shelter would be built by 2005. But it was not until 2007 that the French Novarka consortium, which included Vinci Construction Grands Projets and Bouygues Construction, won the contract to erect a 30,000-ton sliding steel arch, 110 meters in height and 165 meters in length, with a span of 257 meters, over the old sarcophagus. Construction of the arch, which had to endure for the next one hundred years, began in 2010; the deadline for completion, originally scheduled for 2005, was later postponed to 2012, and then to 2013, 2015, 2017, and, finally, 2018. Its cost has been estimated at 1.5 billion euros, with the total cost of the New Safe Confinement Project exceeding 3 billion euros.

It took nine years after the fall of the USSR to close the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and more than a quarter century to build a new shelter over the damaged reactor. The international community emerged victorious in the contest of security priorities. Relations between the two main actors in the post-Chernobyl drama, the Western funding agencies and the Ukrainian government, were not unlike those in a family with a teenager who promises not to behave dangerously if given an ever larger allowance. Some scholars referred to it as environmental blackmail.

But the closure of the Chernobyl power plant and the construction of the new shelter is more than just a story of nuclear extortion of funds by a poor country from rich ones. More than anything else, it is a story of the clash between the demands of individual nations for economic development and the security of the world, as well as of the threat posed to the latter by the political and economic decline of the nuclear powers and the uncertain future of the post-imperial states.

Moscow, the former capital of the empire responsible for the design and operation of the damaged reactor, all but retreated behind the borders of the Russian Federation, leaving it to Ukraine and the international community to clean up the mess. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 brought the fighting within 322 kilometers of the city of Enerhodar, the site of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which operates six reactors. The war also interrupted the nuclear cycle whereby Ukraine received its nuclear fuel from Russia and sent its spent fuel back there. In 2016, Ukraine began the construction of its own spent-fuel facility and declared plans to reduce its almost total dependence on Russian fuel by covering 40 percent of its needs with purchases from the U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Company. While the war and the disruption of the traditional nuclear cycle brought new challenges to the struggling Ukrainian economy, the nuclear industry of the land of Chernobyl took another important step away from its Soviet legacy.

What remained unchanged and impervious to remedy by any amount of internal mobilization or outside assistance were the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. While the actual impact of radiation exposure on the health of the population is still debated, there can be little doubt that the society as a whole was left traumatized for decades to come. Every sixth Ukrainian adult reports being in poor health, a significantly higher percentage than in neighboring countries, and those affected by the Chernobyl radiation have lower levels of employment and fewer working hours than the rest of Ukraine’s population. And then there is the environment. The new shelter over the damaged reactor No. 4 notwithstanding, the area around the nuclear plant will not be safe for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years.

In April 2016, when the world marked the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster, there was a temptation to breathe a sigh of relief. The half-life of cesium-137, one of the most harmful nuclides released during the accident, is approximately thirty years. It is the longest “living” isotope of cesium that can affect the human body through external exposure and ingestion. Other deadly isotopes present in the disaster have long passed their half-life stages: iodine-131 after eight days, and cesium-134 after two years. Cesium-137 is the last of that deadly trio of isotopes. But the harmful impact of the accident is still far from over. With tests revealing that the cesium-137 around Chernobyl is not decaying as quickly as predicted, scholars believe that the isotope will continue to harm the environment for at least 180 years—the time required for half the cesium to be eliminated from the affected areas by weathering and migration. Other radionuclides will perhaps remain in the region forever. The half-life of plutonium-239, traces of which were found as far away as Sweden, is 24,000 years.

The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more. It must learn its lessons from what happened in and around Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.

Adapted from Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy. Copyright © 2018 by Serhii Plokhy. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

In-flight meals that are actually enjoyable are few and far between. In part, that’s because ingredients often need to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles from farms to airports, meaning sometimes they’re not exactly fresh. Singapore Airlines is aiming to change that with a “farm-to-plane” partnership announced Thursday with AeroFarms, a vertical indoor farming company.

At AeroFarms’ Newark, New Jersey headquarters, a variety of leafy greens are grown with only light, nutrients and oxygen — there’s no sunlight or soil to speak of. The operation, which TIME toured on Thursday, resembles a data center, but instead of racks upon racks of servers and other hardware, it has rows of plants in various stages of growth.

AeroFarms’ plants are grown atop a layer of cloth suspended over a chamber about the size of a small bathtub, into which nutrients are pumped. Instead of sunlight, the plants are exposed to LED light, the color of which can be changed depending on whatever’s best for a particular species. The company closely tracks the progress of each batch of plants, providing data that can help it refine the combination of light, nutrients, fertilizers and other factors involved. AeroFarms says its process uses 95% less water than typical farming, and doesn’t use pesticides or similar chemicals.

The company’s “aeroponics” approach, says co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Marc Oshima, is 390 times more efficient in terms of land usage than an equivalent traditional farm. And because the indoor farm is temperature-controlled and protected from the elements, AeroFarms’ growing techniques can be highly customized. “It’s a type of control and precision you can’t ever get out in the field,” says Oshima. He adds that the Newark facility is the world’s largest indoor vertical farm.

It takes about 12-14 days for baby leafy greens to grow at AeroFarms’ facility, Oshima says, compared to 30-45 days at an average outdoor farm. That quicker growth means food can be grown and supplied faster. But it also allows for the kind of rapid prototyping more commonly seen in the software world — if AeroFarms wants to experiment with a different technique for a certain plant, it won’t take long for it to see the results and adjust as needed.

AeroFarms’ proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport, which serves the New York metro area, means that greens grown there can be on a Singapore Airlines passenger’s plate within hours of when they’re harvested, allowing for fresher and tastier meals. The airline hopes to have the first AeroFarms-grown food available on flights by September. Singapore Airlines’ culinary experts are particularly interested in AeroFarms’ bolder, spicer greens, which can help overcome passengers’ decreased senses of smell and taste in dried-out airplane cabins. (TIME enjoyed a taste test of those bolder, spicer greens and can report they’re also excellent while on terra firma.)

Singapore Airlines sees the AeroFarms partnership as a way to further differentiate itself in the crowded, commoditized aviation world. “Food is an area where we can stand out,” says Singapore Airlines VP of PR James Boyd. Some examples of potential Singapore Airlines menu items that could feature AeroFarms greens include soy poached chicken, a garden green salad, and heirloom tomato ceviche. (AeroFarms also sells greens to local grocery stores under the brand name Dream Greens.)

AeroFarms’ approach has benefits beyond fresher salads in first-class and coach. It’s also one potential solution to the problem of so-called “food deserts,” or areas that don’t have enough access to fresh, healthy foods. Some people have looked to rooftop farming as a fix for that problem in urban neighborhoods, but there’s only so much viable rooftop real estate in any given city. But indoor vertical farms like AeroFarms can make use of an entire building to produce food, echoing the way cities have built upwards over time when they run out of room to grow sideways.