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A global helium shortage could burst the bubble for all the businesses that rely on the gas to lift weather balloons, large blimps, and, yes, the balloons at your kid’s birthday bash that make your voice sound like a chipmunk.

But the shortage is potentially deflating for a whole range of other purposes.

Helium is used in deep sea diving, airbags, cryogenics, rocket fuel, MRI machines and in areas of tech that include fiber optics and semiconductors.

With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever.

More of Forbes' wonderful display....

Jerrie Cobb, the first woman in the world to complete U.S. astronaut training in the early 1960s, has died at the age of 88, her family said.

Cobb -- a record-setting pilot before she joined NASA for an astronaut training program with 12 other women, dubbed the "Mercury 13" -- died March 18, but it wasn't announced by a family spokesman until Thursday.

NASA ultimately ended the First Lady Astronaut Training program, choosing instead to send only men into space. Cobb remained an advocate for female pilots and astronauts to the point she once argued for opportunities for women in space program with famed astronaut John Glenn during a 1962 Senate committee hearing. Glenn said at the time, "the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order."

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While people around the world were celebrating the arrival of 2019, people at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland were hard at work. Billions of miles away, the New Horizons probe was flying past Ultima Thule, a small object in the Kuiper Belt. By Tuesday morning, the hardware had sent back a status report that indicated the flyby went as planned, and New Horizons now has lots of data from Ultima Thule that it will slowly send back to Earth over the coming months.

While we don't yet have any of the data that will tell us details about this relic of the Solar System's formation, images taken during the approach solved one of the mysteries that had arisen as New Horizons closed in. But one of the key questions—is Ultima Thule one object or two?—remains unanswered.

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An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut were forced to eject from an aborted launch to the International Space Station early Thursday and make an emergency landing.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were aboard the spacecraft when it launched at 4:40 a.m. EDT on a mission to the station. The duo blasted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft.

Moments after launch, the two were forced to eject from the spacecraft after they encountered trouble with a booster on the rocket.

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A mummified wolf pup and caribou believed to have walked Earth over 50,000 years ago were discovered with tissue and fur intact — a remarkable find, Canadian authorities say.

The caribou was found at the site of a 80,000-year-old volcanic ash bed and officials believe it's among the oldest mummified mammal tissue in the world, according to a release.

The head, two front limbs and torso of the caribou were intact. The wolf pup was found with a complete body.