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Climate change is making fires worse, but that’s not the only reason the Park Fire is particularly disastrous. California’s massive Park Fire—now covering nearly 400,000 acres, an area more than twice as large as New York City—started with arson. On July 24, a 42-year-old man allegedly set his car on fire, put it in neutral, and pushed it down a steep gully at a park in the city of Chico, where dry grass and brush immediately started to burn.

These are the branding news stories we’re reading this week. The 2024 Paris Olympics are in full swing, and with the Games come plenty of exciting design stories. This week in branding news, we’re taking a look at Google’s new Olympics-themed ad, and a line of art deco animations based on the 22 sports that will be featured at the Paralympics starting later this month.

Satellite data shows fire-produced thunderstorms are much more common than anyone realized just a few years ago. Wildfire blowups, fire whirls, towering thunderstorms: When fires get large and hot enough, they can actually create their own weather. In these extreme fire situations, firefighters’ ordinary methods to directly control the fire don’t work, and wildfires burn out of control.

Several crypto Super PACs are shaking up down-ticket races. That’s getting Washington’s attention.  Last week, Donald Trump spoke in front of the world’s biggest Bitcoin conference in Nashville. The Republican presidential nominee, who has for months positioned himself as the “crypto candidate,” reportedly raised $21 million at the event; just days after the conference he began selling a limited run of $500 high-top sneakers that read “Trump Crypto President” on their sides.

Welcome to Edition 7.05 of the Rocket Report! The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for 15 days after a rare failure of its upper stage earlier this month. The FAA gave the green light for Falcon 9 to return to flight July 25, and within a couple of days, SpaceX successfully launched three missions from three launch pads.

The nova we will see later this year occurred 2,000-plus years ago, but its light will just be reaching us later this year. The stars aren’t fixed and unchanging, unlike what many ancient people thought. Once in a while, a star appears where there wasn’t one before, and then it fades away in a matter of days or weeks.