What happened
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh yesterday rejected an emergency appeal from Missouri Republican officials to pause last week’s unanimous Missouri Supreme Court ruling that a new congressional map was void and can’t be used in the upcoming midterm elections. Shortly after Kavanaugh’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark ruled in a separate case that Missouri can’t use any map other than the new one, drawn to net Republicans one House seat as part of President Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting push.  

Who said what
Taken together, The New York Times said, “the dueling court orders left Missouri where it began, with no agreement about which congressional map should be in effect in November and no immediate route to resolving that question.” Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) said the state “is prepared to follow and comply with” the ruling from Clark, a Trump appointee. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) told local election officials they must use the new districts, which he had also ordered used for last month’s primaries.

What next?
People Not Politicians, the group fighting the GOP gerrymander, asked Clark to stay his ruling, appealed it to the U.S. 8th Circuit Court and asked the Missouri Supreme Court to hold Hoskins in contempt for violating its order to use the 2022 maps. Missouri must start sending out absentee ballots Sept. 19.

What happened
Lonnie Bunch III yesterday said he will retire as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at the end of the year, “with very mixed emotions and heartfelt gratitude.” The founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bunch (pictured above) became the first Black person and first historian to lead the Smithsonian in 2019. His “seven-year run” as secretary was “marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration” over “how the Smithsonian presents American history and values,” The New York Times said. 

Who said what
Bunch told The Wall Street Journal his decision to retire had “nothing” to do with President Donald Trump or the White House. “It was really just saying, now’s the time,” he told the Times. Still, “it has been stressful,” and “I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.” Bunch has “defended the organization’s independence” from Trump’s “efforts to assert control" over its content, CNN said, but he “also tread a fine political line.”

What next?
“Unlike the Kennedy Center, Trump does not have the power to select or remove the Smithsonian leadership at will,” Politico said. But “he can have tremendous influence in the process” through selecting new members of the Board of Regents. The 17 regents, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, will appoint Bunch’s successor. 

Scientists have found vibrant microbial communities in fog, including bacteria that can detoxify air pollution. Fog water can have “bacterial concentrations similar to those in continental or marine bodies of water,” said a study published in the journal mBio. 

Fog is “basically just a cloud that’s low to the ground — water vapor that has condensed or frozen to form tiny droplets or crystals in the air,” said The Weather Channel. The study focused on radiation fog, which is the still kind that “occurs on clear nights as the ground cools the moist air immediately above it.” 

The researchers, from Arizona State University and Susquehanna University, “collected and analyzed samples from 32 separate fog events,” Susquehanna said in a news release. The findings showed that fog is “more than a vehicle for transporting microbes” and could “serve as a habitat where bacteria can thrive and positively influence atmospheric chemistry, air quality and even climate processes.”

Scientists identified Methylobacterium as “one of the most abundant bacteria in the samples,” Susquehanna University said. These microbes “consume single-carbon compounds such as formaldehyde,” a common air pollutant “that contributes to ozone smog and poses health risks.” 

The Methylobacteria “cleared such large amounts of formaldehyde so quickly that the researchers suspected they weren’t just eating it,” ASU said in a release on the study. “At high levels, the chemical is toxic to the bacteria, so they break it down into carbon dioxide to keep the levels low,” which is a “win-win for microbes and humans alike.”