Australian animated series "Bluey" has captured the hearts and minds of children, parents and childless adults alike. In 2023, it was the "second-most popular streaming show in the U.S., where it was watched for 731 million hours," said Vox. Following the domestic lives of a canine nuclear family, the program treats its young audience members as sophisticated beings who can handle emotional complexity. But "Bluey" made headlines when its finale made countless adult viewers weep too.

'The audacity'
"Bluey" plots are dedicated to the simplest joys and woes of daily life: sibling squabbles, imaginary play and raising children from a parent's perspective. It's just as much about parents Bandit and Chilli's experience as it is about their kids, and both parents take great pains to validate the feelings of their little girls. The series is unafraid to confront the difficulties of parenting. "That's the audacity of 'Bluey,'" said The Atlantic. "It trusts that its young audience will be able to understand stories that are about the foibles and insecurities of parents, too."

Viral finale
Typical "Bluey" episodes are seven minutes long, but the finale released on April 14 was a daring 28 minutes. In "The Sign," Bandit takes a job in another city, which means they must come to terms with leaving their home. The kids are having a hard time with the impending transition, and secretly, the parents are too. 

After the episode's release, scores of adults posted on social media about how hard it hit them. "The last time he cried was at the birth of our baby," said a viewer named Brittany Bailey alongside a photo of her husband crying while watching the episode. "'Bluey' is so much more than a kids' cartoon."

Setting a standard
While a lot of entertainment for kids is centered around magic, fantasy or superheroes, "Bluey" is about the mundane. "The hardest thing to do is get through a day. 'Bluey,' somehow, captures that," said The Daily Beast. 

"The radical innovation of 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood' was to see children as people," said Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Meanwhile, "Bluey" is a "triumph of good-natured naturalism, a clarion understanding of what play really feels like and its importance in childhood." Perhaps "Bluey" will set a new standard, proving that kids' shows can succeed with emotional nuance, real-life storylines and adult perspectives. 

The Persian Gulf was recently hit with a year's worth of rain in two days, causing extensive flooding. Some have speculated that cloud seeding, a method of manipulating clouds to produce more rain, by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is responsible for the downpour. But while scientists have said that geoengineering was not the cause this time, the extreme rain has raised concerns about this technique to manipulate nature.

What is it?
Cloud seeding is a "weather modification concept that attempts to draw more rain or snow out of a cloud than would occur naturally," said CNN. "This can be done by using aircraft to drop small particles (like silver iodide) into clouds," the BBC said. "Water vapor can then condense more easily and turn into rain." The idea was conceived to increase rainfall in especially arid regions, and the UAE has used the technique for decades.

While some data has shown that cloud seeding could increase precipitation and snowpack, not enough research has been done to determine how effective the method truly is. In fact, it may actually make some regions drier. "It is possible that you're actually stealing water from someone else when you do (cloud seeding)," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said to CNN.

Can it cause severe flooding?
Scientists do not attribute Dubai's extensive flooding to cloud seeding. "Even if cloud seeding did occur, it would take sophisticated research to determine whether it increased the rainfall — something that has proved difficult in past scientific inquiry," said The Washington Post. "This isn't a setting where you can do a truly controlled experiment," Swain said.

Instead, experts attribute the rainfall to a "large slow-moving storm that traversed the Arabian Peninsula and tracked into the Gulf of Oman over the course of multiple days," CNN said. While cloud seeding can potentially increase precipitation, "the atmosphere would have likely been carrying more water to form clouds in the first place, because of climate change," Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said to the Post. And increasingly, severe storms will become the norm as climate change worsens.