Move over, Horace: It’s Frederick’s turn to make a stink.

Frederick, the “sibling” of last year’s corpse flower sensation at the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory at Como Park in St. Paul, is expected to bloom imminently (perhaps this weekend). With that bloom comes the rare and large tropical plant’s signature stink.

Just like last year, the corpse flower’s unfolding is expected to be a brief event — perhaps 24 to 48 hours — but the public will soon be able to watch the “Corpse Cam” if they aren’t able to visit Frederick. The public can tune in and get updates at comozooconservatory.org/frederick.

If this is a competition, as it often is with siblings, this could be a bigger year than last.

“It’s been interesting to see that Frederick is growing larger,” said Jen Love, the horticulturist who tends to both Horace and Frederick. “I’m not totally surprised, because the tuber weighed more.”

(Tubers, Love says, are akin to underground storage systems from which the blooms emerge.)

To put it in perspective: Frederick weighed 58 pounds the last time the plant was repotted, compared to Horace’s 40 pounds shortly before blooming.

It should make for a bigger show.

“Frederick is taller, which is great,” Love says. “Other than that, I expect them to have a lot of similarities. It still won’t be a record breaker by any means — it’s not uncommon for these blooms to be nine feet tall.”

Just how tall is Fred?

“This morning, it measured 68 inches,” Love said on Tuesday. “And it will keep growing until it’s ready to bloom. We will start measuring it daily now and as we see that growth rate really slow down, we’ll be able to narrow in on our prediction. So right now, we are predicting Thursday, but that is just an approximate guess.”

Fredrick and Horace’s roots

Guests gather around the corpse flower “Frederick” in the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory at Como Park in St. Paul on Tuesday. (Kathryn Kovalenko / Pioneer Press)

Frederick and Horace are true siblings, sharing the same parents. Started from seed in 2017 at the Greater Des Moines Botanic Garden, they were donated soon after to the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory.

(Later, the conservatory paid it forward, sending one tuber to the San Diego Botanic Garden and two to the Center for Conservation and Research at San Antonio Zoo.)

Horace was named after Horace Cleveland, described by the conservatory as “a key figure in shaping the St. Paul park system in the late 1800s.” This Horace bloomed for the first time in 2024 at the age of seven.

Frederick is named after Frederick Nussbaumer, who became the city’s parks superintendent in 1891, the conservatory says, “following four years as a gardener right here at Como Park.” While his brother rests this growing season, Frederick is preparing for his first bloom at age eight.

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Just like other corpse flowers, these tropical titans that typically only bloom every two or three years are a spectacle that draws in visitors.

“It’s the novelty, because it doesn’t bloom very frequently,” says Love. “Most people aren’t going to get to travel to Sumatra, so you’re not going to get to see one in the wild. And then it’s the size and the smell. It is the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence in the world.”

To a casual observer, the corpse flower looks like an ear of corn emerging from some leaves of lettuce. And the stink? That depends on your nose.

“It is really bad,” Love says. “I think it’s kind of a combination of rotting trash on a hot day and a dead mouse.”

There’s a purpose behind the smell, though.

“It’s a strategy the plant has for attracting the beetles, the flies — the things that would be attracted to a carcass are the insects that pollinate it,” Love says.

Frederick’s receiving line

In 2024, more than 30,000 visitors lined up to meet Horace within the conservatory, which is located within Como Park at 1225 Estabrook Drive.

Guests photograph “Horace,” a Corpse Flower beginning to bloom at the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park in St. Paul on Thursday, May 23, 2024. (Derek Bourcy / Special to the Pioneer Press)

This year, Frederick is situated in the Palm Dome, a spot in the conservatory that better accommodates the expected lines, a place not impacted by early closures due to private events.

On their way to the Charlotte Partridge Ordway Japanese Garden on Tuesday, Kay Loeffler and her son, Isaac, paused to check out the informational displays about corpse flowers set up around Fred, who at that moment looked like a large but unassuming potted plant (and was not stinky yet).

“My only reference to the corpse flower is from the movie, ‘Dennis the Menace,’” said Loeffler with a laugh. “That’s the big thing, that it’s about to bloom, and Dennis ruins it for him.”

Frederick is behind ropes, and hopefully safe from any interrupting menaces.

The public, though, should be prepared to wait in a line outside: an umbrella for shade or rain and a water bottle would be a good idea, a spokesman said.

While admission to the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory is free, voluntary donations of $4 for adults and $2 for children are welcome. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, but the public can visit Frederick until 8 p.m. on Wednesday (June 18) due to a concert.

Endangered

A corpse flower in bloom is shown at the California Academy of Sciences’ Osher Rainforest in San Francisco, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

About 9,500 miles away from St. Paul, in the tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, the corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum, grows wild. Or doesn’t.

“I like to touch on some conservation messaging about it,” Love says of the corpse flower. “If you’re familiar with the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), it’s the organization that tracks species and their status in the wild. So its IUCN status is endangered. There are definitely fewer than 1,000 individuals left in the wild. The number that was actually tracked last count was only around 300.

“So even though botanical gardens have had a lot of success growing them so that we can share the information and keep the genetics going, we do really want people to understand that deforestation in Sumatra has really decimated their habitat.

“One of the key reasons the Sumatran rainforest is being deforested is to build or to plant more palm oil plantations,” she says. “Palm oil is in a lot of foods that we eat.”

It’s also used in other everyday products, including lipstick, chocolate and detergent, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

So what can we do?

“There’s actually an app I’d like people to use,” Love recommends. “It’s called PalmOil Scan and you can use it to help you choose products that use sustainable palm oil so that you can be more conscious of what’s happening in the habitat of Sumatra.”

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PalmOil Scan, according to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, is produced in collaboration with the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. While the app’s messaging focuses on orangutans, Love says, the sustainability also applies to helping out corpse flowers.

Of course, the public can also support the corpse flower by visiting Como Park Zoo & Conservatory. Love saw that support happen last year.

“Honestly, it generated a lot more traffic than I thought it would,” Love says of the excitement over Horace. “But I know that people do get really interested in them. And a lot of botanic gardens see people turn out time after time, every time they bloom. And that’s one of the reasons we grow them — it’s a great way to get people excited about plants. And anything that gets people excited about plants is a good thing to grow.”

By Loren Grush, Bloomberg News

NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for four years, drilling into the alien soil to collect dirt it places in tubes and leaves on the ground.

Engineers designed Perseverance to be the first step in the agency’s exploration of the Red Planet. In the future, more robotic spacecraft would arrive to sweep up the capsules and rocket them back to Earth, where scientists could look for signs that Mars once was, or is, a world with life.

The wait for answers may be about to get longer. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration would cancel the planned follow-on mission, potentially abandoning the tubes for decades to Martian dust storms.

The White House is calling for a roughly 50% cut to NASA’s science spending to $3.9 billion, part of an overall pullback that would deliver the lowest funding level in the agency’s history and kill more more than 40 NASA science missions and projects, according to detailed plans released last month. The Trump administration has also left the agency without a permanent leader and without a vision for how America’s civilian space policy is going to work with U.S. allies and compete with China and other rivals.

The cuts would follow a shift in how the American public thinks about space. NASA has long enjoyed a unique place in U.S. culture, with its exploits celebrated by movies, theme parks and merchandise — but companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have begun to capture more attention.

For decades, NASA’s scientific undertakings have provided critical groundwork for researchers seeking to understand the structure of the universe, study how planets form and hunt for evidence that life might exist beyond Earth. Pictures from NASA craft like the Hubble Space Telescope and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope have inspired and delighted millions.

Now, the agency’s position at the vanguard of discovery is facing foreclosure. Among the other programs set to lose funding are a craft already on its way to rendezvous with an asteroid that’s expected to pass close to Earth in 2029, and multiple efforts to map and explore the acidic clouds of Venus. Researchers worry that abandoning missions would mean investments made by earlier generations might be lost or forgotten.

“Once you launch and you’re operating, then all those costs are behind you, and it’s relatively inexpensive to just keep the missions going,” said Amanda Hendrix, the chief executive officer of the Planetary Science Institute, a nonprofit research organization. “So I’m very concerned about these operating missions that are still producing excellent and really important science data.”

The Trump administration’s narrower vision for NASA comes as it is seeking to reduce waste and jobs in the U.S. government. Critics have faulted NASA over sluggish management of key programs, spiraling costs and delays.

Still, the administration is eager to pour more money into putting people in space. It wants to use $7 billion of the $18.8 billion it would allocate to NASA overall to ramp up efforts to return people to the moon, and invest $1 billion more in sending people to Mars.

“This is a NASA that would be primarily human spaceflight focused,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration, said of the proposed changes. “This is a NASA that would say, ‘The universe is primarily the moon and Mars,’ and basically step away from everything else.”

There are signs that the administration’s proposed cutbacks won’t satisfy lawmakers who view space as vital to U.S. interests. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who leads a committee that oversees NASA, has proposed legislation that would would provide nearly $10 billion to the agency.

“American dominance in space is a national security imperative,” Cruz said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The Commerce Committee’s bill carefully invests in beating China to the Moon and Mars — while respecting every taxpayer dollar. It’s rocket fuel for the commercial space companies and NASA that are working to keep America ahead of China in the Space Race.”

As Trump’s spending proposal moves through Congress, NASA has been left without a strong leader who can press its case after the president withdrew his nomination of billionaire commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman to run the agency.

In a recent interview on the “All-In Podcast,” Isaacman appeared to suggest Trump pulled his nomination because of his close ties to Musk, who had a public falling out with the president. Trump threatened to cancel SpaceX’s government contracts amid the row, but has since backed down.

“Stopping Jared from becoming confirmed is only going to hurt NASA’s ability to push back on budget cuts,” Jim Muncy, a space consultant and lobbyist with PoliSpace, said before Isaacman’s nomination was pulled.

Spaceflight Shift

For decades, NASA handled every step of launching rockets, probes and people into space, from developing, building and launching vehicles, to running missions. Only the government had the resources and the capacity to shoulder the risks without returning a profit.

That all changed in recent years with the emergence of a vibrant U.S. space industry dominated by wealthy entrepreneurs with a passion for spaceflight and the financial wherewithal to withstand repeated failure.

Over time, NASA has ceded more design, development and production work to those companies. SpaceX is carrying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and sending probes into deep space from a rented launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. After helping to spur the development of SpaceX hardware, NASA is now one of the company’s biggest customers.

“This has kind of been the tension with the rise of commercial space,” said Mike French, a consultant for the Space Policy Group. “NASA has gone from ‘We’re operating these things; we’re building these things’ to ‘We’ve gotten really good at buying these things.’”

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During Trump’s presidency, NASA’s transformation into an incubator for private industry is likely to gain speed. Throughout its budget proposal, the White House calls for mimicking past programs that have leaned more on outsourcing to the private sector.

“With a leaner budget across all of government, we are all taking a closer look at how we work, where we invest, and how we adjust our methods to accomplish our mission,” NASA’s acting administrator, Janet Petro, wrote in a message accompanying the plan. “At NASA, that means placing a renewed emphasis on human spaceflight, increasing investments in a sustainable plan to return to the Moon for long-term human exploration and accelerating efforts to send American astronauts to Mars.”

NASA declined to comment beyond Petro’s statement.

NASA contracts remain one of the most significant and steady sources of funding for the space industry, which has allowed the agency to set the direction for many businesses. But that balance of power is shifting, and cuts to NASA’s funding could cause its leadership to fade.

“NASA would, in a sense, define access and define the culture of spaceflight and define the ambitions of spaceflight,” Dreier said. “Now, they have competitors for that, and frankly, some of their competitors are laying out more ambitious programs.”

Challenging Missions

While NASA has evolved into a technical adviser and financial backer for space companies, pure science has remained part of its mission. NASA’s transition to more commercial partnerships was started, in part, to free up money to spend on exotic, challenging missions with no obvious near-term commercial rewards.

Pulling back is likely to have consequences. Trump’s broader push to curtail funding for science — the administration has choked off money for medical, climate and other research — risks eroding an important source of American soft power.

After the end of the Cold War-era space race, NASA became a vessel for international cooperation, proving countries with lofty goals can work together. Many of the NASA missions Trump has proposed canceling or pulling away from entailed collaboration with European allies.

The prospect of reduced funding is also causing worry about agency talent. Already, NASA is competing with the private space industry for engineers. Shutting down missions could push agency scientists to seek other opportunities.

“Folks are very worried about what they’re going to do now with their lives, and where they’re going to go,” said Hendrix, the Planetary Science Institute’s CEO.

The long-term outlook for NASA is difficult to discern. In the coming years, it is expected to continue its Artemis moon program, and start a new program for human exploration of Mars, with commercial companies at the forefront. But the scientific ambitions that long helped define NASA appear likely to become more limited.

“If we elect to say we no longer want to understand our origins, or we no longer want to challenge ourselves to see if there’s life out in the cosmos, that is the equivalent of turning our heads down and burying ourselves in our cellphones when we’re standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon,” said The Planetary Society’s Dreier. “We miss something more profound and big and deep that we otherwise have no access to in our modern society.”

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Joe Biden will be attending a Juneteenth celebration at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Galveston, Texas.

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The former Democratic president’s plans were confirmed by a person with knowledge of them but not authorized to discuss logistics publicly.

In 2021, Biden signed legislation that established Juneteenth as a federal holiday. The day marks the end of slavery by commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston.

The event Thursday will be held at the Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston.

That church, the first and oldest operating AME church in the state, is one of the locations where an order announcing the end of slavery in Texas was announced on that day in 1865, according to the Galveston County Daily News.

The death of longtime Oak Park Heights Mayor Mary McComber last month left an opening on the city council and necessitated a change in leadership.

Former Deputy Mayor Chuck Dougherty is now mayor, and council member Mike Runk has been appointed deputy mayor.

Oak Park Heights Deputy Mayor Chuck Dougherty, left, is now mayor following the May 26 death of longtime Mayor Mary McComber, right. Mike Runk has been appointed deputy mayor. (Courtesy photos)

The council is accepting applications from candidates interested in filling the vacant city council seat. The deadline for applying is July 3; applications can be found on the city’s website or at City Hall.

The appointed council member will serve until a special election in November 2026; Dougherty will serve as mayor until a special election at the same time.

Both special elections would be for a two-year term to finish McComber’s and Dougherty’s remaining terms, said City Administrator Jacob Rife.

Dougherty has served on the council since 2013. Prior to that, he served on both the parks commission and the planning commission.

“I am honored and grateful for the trust the Oak Park Heights City Council has placed in me by appointing me as mayor of our city,” Dougherty said. “Mayor McComber left some big shoes to fill, but in this time of transition, I am committed to providing steady leadership and ensuring continuity for our community.”

McComber, 71, died May 26 at her home in Oak Park Heights of complications related to Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She served for 12 years on the Oak Park Heights City Council before running for mayor in 2012.

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