A couple of newly discovered asteroids whizzed past our planet earlier this month, tracing their own loop around the sun. These two aren’t any more special than the thousands of other asteroids in the ever-growing catalog of near-Earth objects. But a recent news article in The Jerusalem Post described them in a rather eye-catching, even startling, way: Each rock, the story said, is “around the size of 22 emperor penguins stacked nose to toes.”

Now, if someone asked me to describe the size of an asteroid (or anything, for that matter), penguins wouldn’t be the first unit that comes to mind. But the penguin asteroid is only the latest example of a common strategy in science communication: evoking images of familiar, earthly objects to convey the scope of mysterious, celestial ones. Usually, small asteroids are said to be the size of buses, skyscrapers, football fields, tennis courts, cars—mundane, inanimate things. Lately, though, the convention seems to be veering toward the weird.

Also this month, the same Jerusalem Post reporter, Aaron Reich, described another pair of asteroids as “approximately the size of 100 adult pugs.” Last year, a Daily Mail article wrote that an asteroid that had recently disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere was “about half the size of a giraffe.” A scientific magazine, capitalizing on that article’s popularity, announced that astronomers would launch a “new asteroid-classification system based on animal sizes”—then revealed that it was only joking, dismissing the idea as “nonsense.” But maybe we shouldn’t scoff at the practice of comparing asteroids to penguins or other delightfully odd things. Asteroids, like other space objects and phenomena, can be tricky to contextualize. Maybe there’s room for whimsy. A new era of asteroid communication may be upon us.

Scientists don’t have formal guidelines for describing the nature of asteroids on a human scale. “It’s a real challenge to try and communicate physical properties of something that people aren’t going to actually lay eyes on or have any personal experience with,” Eric Christensen, a University of Arizona astronomer who oversees a program that detects near-Earth objects, told me. “Nobody’s ever visited an asteroid, so not even astronauts have firsthand experience of what it’s like.” And if they did, they probably wouldn’t think, Ah, yes, just as I expected—it’s as tall as 40 sea turtles stacked like a sleeve of crackers.

[Read: The best-ever photos of an asteroid’s rugged terrain]

So when astronomers talk about asteroids, they reach for the familiar. (As for the journalists who write about asteroids, I tried to contact the authors of the Jerusalem Post and Daily Mail stories, but they haven’t responded). Consider last year’s marquee space-rock event, when NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid as practice for deflecting any future, actually hazardous visitors. Some scientists likened the size of that asteroid, named Dimorphos, to a football stadium; others compared it to an Egyptian pyramid.

These can be helpful images, but the approach has its limitations. “You can be into sports, but if you’re not into U.S. football, these football fields make no sense,” Carrie Nugent, a planetary scientist at Olin College who studies asteroids, told me. And the pyramids of Egypt sound cooler than a stadium, but the analogy is certainly less effective if you’ve never been to Cairo. The same goes for the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York City, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—all of which have been used as units of measure in asteroid comparisons.

Penguins, cute as they are, have the same shortcoming. (Sorry, penguins!) “I don’t know how many people actually have a good sense of scale for penguins,” Daniella DellaGiustina, a scientist at the University of Arizona who works on a NASA asteroid mission, told me. “I remember seeing some penguins at the zoo when I was in the Southern Hemisphere, and they were bigger than I thought they would be.” Even if people can fairly accurately picture a penguin, comparing something to 22 of them “requires the reader to imagine 22 (cute!) penguins standing on each other’s shoulders—something no one has ever seen before,” David Polishook, an astronomer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told me in an email. “A comparison with one train car, for example, is much simpler.”

[Read: A handful of asteroid could help decipher our entire existence]

Then there’s the problem of shape. A stadium, a pyramid, the Eiffel Tower—these objects all have very different outlines. The asteroids that orbit near Earth are, for the most part, lumps. They are not long and narrow like skyscrapers or cruise ships, another common unit of comparison. A stack of emperor penguins might convey the length of an asteroid from one end to the other, but it doesn’t really tell you how big the asteroid is. Using penguins may even be “a bit misleading,” Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who works on NASA’s asteroid-deflection mission, told me. “If you think about the volume of that body, it’s more like—boy, I don’t know, hundreds of penguins?”

Without a convention to guide them, scientists follow their own preferences (and so, it seems, do journalists). DellaGiustina likes to invoke landforms, such as mountains and ridges. “These asteroids are little worlds,” she said. Not only can we picture a mountain, but we can also probably imagine ourselves hiking on a trail and feeling the craggy ground beneath us—a thought exercise that could make a faraway cosmic object less inscrutable. Nugent likes to tackle as many dimensions as possible. The asteroid that led to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to have been about 10 kilometers (32,000 feet) wide—which, she notes, is close to the cruising altitude of an airplane. So “imagine yourself in a plane, and imagine a giant, round rock that goes from your wing tip all the way to the ground, and which takes you over a minute to fly over,” she said. Adding a pile of penguins to this scenario would likely make it more confusing.

Animal parallels have one clear advantage over buses and the like: They’re guaranteed to draw more attention. Christensen said he isn’t very amused by the trend, calling it clickbait. Asteroids are already easy targets for sensationalist coverage; some publications treat close approaches to Earth as panic-worthy near misses. Exhibit A, from The Daily Mirror in 2019: “Asteroid the Size of BIG BEN Is Hurtling Towards Earth, NASA Warns.” In reality, no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth in this century, and we’ll probably be safe for even longer than that.

[Read: Maybe we won’t end up like the dinosaurs]

When you’re picking an unconventional unit of measurement, context counts. People have a tendency to anthropomorphize just about anything space-related, whether it’s a robot or a comet. Some of the public reaction to NASA’s asteroid “redirection” last year carried a tone of “Oh no, poor asteroid”; indeed, Dimorphos was just minding its own business when NASA came along and smashed into it. Imagine how much more violent that would have felt if scientists and journalists had compared the asteroid to something squishier than a stadium. Rivkin suspects that if astronomers had compared it to, say, a blue whale, “you’d have these cartoons about us beating up a blue whale.”

Lighthearted comparisons would also be the wrong choice in the hypothetical event of a large space rock hurtling straight toward Earth. If a truly dangerous asteroid were ever approaching, the most important thing for the public to understand would be not its size, but the extent of the potential destruction it could cause. Scientists would have to consider darker metaphors, perhaps tallying the energy of the impact in nuclear detonations.

But for garden-variety asteroids, the ones that pass right by us or burn up in the atmosphere, animal comparisons might not be so bad. Nugent is delighted by the development. Sure, a reader might be disappointed to discover that the asteroid in question isn’t shaped exactly like an alligator, but they might also learn something illuminating about asteroids that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Still, let’s take some extra care with certain comparisons. After all, describing an asteroid as “half the size of a giraffe” prompts readers to consider a rather horrifying question: Which half?

In the dark early days of the pandemic, when we knew almost nothing and feared almost everything, there was a moment when people became very, very worried about toilets. More specifically, they were worried about the possibility that the cloud of particles toilets spew into the air when flushed—known in the scientific literature as “toilet plume”—might be a significant vector of COVID transmission. Because the coronavirus can be found in human excrement, “flushing the toilet may fling coronavirus aerosols all over,” The New York Times warned in June 2020. Every so often in the years since, the occasional PSA from a scientist or public-health expert has renewed the scatological panic.

In retrospect, so much of what we thought we knew in those early days was wrong. Lysoling our groceries turned out to not be helpful. Masking turned out to be very helpful. Hand-washing, though still important, was not all it was cracked up to be, and herd immunity, in the end, was a mirage. As the country shifts into post-pandemic life and takes stock of the past three years, it’s worth asking: What really was the deal with toilet plume?

The short answer is that our fears have not been substantiated, but they weren’t entirely overblown either. Scientists have been studying toilet plume for decades. They’ve found that plumes vary in magnitude depending on the type of toilet and flush mechanism. Flush energy plays a role too: The greater it is, the larger the plume. Closing the lid (if the toilet has one) helps a great deal, though even that cannot completely eliminate toilet plume—particles can still escape through the gap between the seat and the lid.

Whatever the specifics, the main conclusion from years of research preceding the pandemic has been consistent and disgusting: “Flush toilets produce substantial quantities of toilet plume aerosol capable of entraining microorganisms at least as large as bacteria … These bioaerosols may remain viable in the air for extended periods and travel with air currents,” scientists at the CDC and the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health wrote in a 2013 review paper titled “Lifting the Lid on Toilet Plume Aerosol.” In other words, when you flush a toilet, an unsettling amount of the contents go up rather than down.

Knowing this is one thing; seeing it is another. Traditionally, scientists have measured toilet plume with either a particle counter or, in at least one case, “a computational model of an idealized toilet.” But in a new study published last month, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder took things a step further, using bright-green lasers to render visible what usually, blessedly, is not. John Crimaldi, an engineering professor and a co-author of the study, who has spent 25 years using lasers to illuminate invisible phenomena, told me that he and his colleagues went into the experiment fully expecting to see something. Even so, they were “completely caught off guard” by the results. The plume was bigger, faster, and more energetic than they’d anticipated—“like an eruption,” Crimaldi said, or, as he and his colleagues put it in their paper, a “strong chaotic jet.”

Within eight seconds, the resulting cloud of aerosols shoots nearly five feet above the toilet bowl—that is, more than six feet above the ground. That is: straight into your face. After the initial burst, the plume continues to rise until it hits the ceiling, and then it wafts outward. It meets a wall and runs along it. Before long, it fills the room. Once that happens, it hangs around for a while. “You can sort of extrapolate in your own mind to walking into a public restroom in an airport that has 20 toilet stalls, all of them flushing every couple minutes,” Crimaldi said. Not a pleasant thought.

The question, then, is not so much whether toilet plume happens—like it or not, it clearly does—as whether it presents a legitimate transmission risk of COVID or anything else. This part is not so clear. The 2013 review paper identified studies of the original SARS virus as “among the most compelling indicators of the potential for toilet plume to cause airborne disease transmission.” (The authors also noted, in a dry aside, that although SARS was “not presently a common disease, it has demonstrated its potential for explosive spread and high mortality.”) The one such study the authors discuss explicitly is a report on the 2003 outbreak in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex. That study, though, is far from conclusive, Mark Sobsey, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. The researchers didn’t rule out other modes of transmission, nor did they attempt to culture live virus from the fecal matter—a far more reliable indicator of infectiousness than mere detection.

Beyond that, Sobsey said, there is little evidence that toilet plumes spread SARS or COVID-19. In his own review, published in December 2021, Sobsey found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter. This, at least, seems to track with the three years of pandemic experience we’ve all now endured. Although we can’t easily prove that bathrooms don’t play a significant role in spreading COVID-19, we haven’t seen any glaring indications that they do. And anyway, the coronavirus has found plenty of other awful ways to spread.

Just because toilet plume doesn’t seem to be a vector of COVID transmission, though, doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus, Sobsey told me, present a more serious risk of transmission via toilet plume, because they are known to spread via fecal matter. The only real solutions are structural. Improved ventilation would keep aerosolized waste from building up in the air, and germicidal lighting, though the technology is still being developed, could potentially disinfect what remains. Neither, however, would stop the plume in the first place. To do that, you would need to change the toilet itself: In order to create a smoother and thus better-contained flush, you could change the geometry of the bowl, the way the water enters and exits, or any number of other variables. Toilet manufacturers could also, you know, stop producing lidless toilets.

But none of that will save you the next time you find yourself staring into a toilet’s blank maw. Crimaldi suggests wearing a mask in public bathrooms to protect against not just the plume created when you flush but also the plumes left by the person who used the bathroom before you, the person who used it before them, and so on. You don’t need to have any great affection for masking as a public-health intervention to consider donning one for a few minutes to avoid literally breathing in shit. Sobsey offered another bit of unconventional bathroom-hygiene advice, which he acknowledged can only do so much to protect you: If you find yourself in a public restroom with a lidless toilet, he said, consider washing your hands before you flush. Then “hold your breath, flush the toilet, and leave.”

Eighteen months ago, I woke up in the cardiac intensive care unit of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. "What happened?" I repeatedly asked the clinicians taking care of me as my brain struggled to process how I had gone from a dinner with friends to being on a ventilator in a hospital.

News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration. And not only did they happen in areas that have historically been sanctuaries for Asian residents, but the suspects in both cases are themselves Asian.

These events have added fuel to what my colleague Katherine Hu described as “an invisible, pervasive dread” among many Asian Americans, including myself. For days I’ve been struggling to process—and produce fully formed thoughts about—the shootings. How should I respond, as someone of Chinese descent, living mere miles away from Monterey Park? When I was asked to potentially reflect on my personal experience for The Atlantic, I hesitated. After all, I’d gone about my day after reading the news, even putting off calling my folks. Was that wrong?

My confusion may have stemmed, in part, from the inexplicability of these crimes, Christine Catipon, the president-elect of the Asian American Psychological Association, told me. “There’s absolutely a lot of cognitive dissonance happening,” she said. “Why would someone do this on Lunar New Year? … Why would [the alleged perpetrator] be someone from our community?”

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Indeed, the other psychologists I spoke with also acknowledged the painful, conflicting emotions that might arise from these incidents. “For a large part of the Asian American community, we don’t have a very public, practiced language” around a tragedy such as the Monterey Park shooting, said William Ming Liu, a counseling-psychology professor at the University of Maryland. “We’re trying to figure out, like, Who are we? How do we come together? What does it mean for us?” he told me. “These complex traumas take time to process.” The result, he said, has been greater anxiety, hypersensitivity, and “a spike in fear” that is affecting many in the Asian diaspora in subtle but potentially severe ways.

The shootings happened close to Lunar New Year, a holiday that is celebrated in different ways among different ethnic communities but that’s generally considered to be a moment of renewal and conviviality. For me, this meant cleaning my home to welcome good fortune, cooking traditional dishes, and gathering with my closest friends. The violence that occurred on Lunar New Year’s eve in Monterey Park forced many to reconcile jubilation with terror. “This should be a time of celebration … about joyousness and family and coming together,” said Sherry Wang, an associate professor at Santa Clara University. “This is such an exponential level of cultural pain that is juxtaposed with a cultural celebration that cuts across borders.”

In addition, many Asian Americans are still wrestling with the knowledge that they’ve been—or could be—targets of attacks spurred by racist language about the pandemic’s origins. Hearing news of violence against any Asian population in the U.S. might produce a shock and suspicion that builds on that underlying anxiety. Liu told me his initial thought after learning of the first shooting was, “This [has to be] somebody from outside the community who found this community of Asian Americans.”

Wang also assumed that, given the racist motives for some previous attacks, what happened in Monterey Park was a hate crime. Thus, when the alleged shooter was revealed to be an Asian man, those existing, potent negative emotions became further twisted, requiring “a lot of mental gymnastics,” Wang said. “We have to push against our own [ideas] of how violence can happen to our communities, when it’s from somebody within our community.”

She added that many Asian cultures value respect for elders; the idea that they could hurt their own is almost incomprehensible. In other words, these developments can challenge assumptions within the Asian community that certain spaces are safe for them. I’d always believed ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park were uniquely protected. I’d never thought that ballroom dancing, the activity many of the victims there were participating in, could somehow lead to death; my dad danced for years at our local cultural center.

And then there is the issue of rhetoric: The term Asian American, despite being established in the late 1960s by Asian American activists hoping to consolidate political power, can be limiting. The label could cause many different ethnic groups to be seen as a single society and be expected to have a shared response—as well as a shared understanding of events such as these shootings. Yet, Liu explained, the possible motives behind these crimes can be hard to talk about even among ostensibly similar cultures. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are all sorts of collective traumas and individual traumas a lot of our elders have experienced but have never processed and never dealt with,” he said, listing traumas associated with their backgrounds and their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as examples.

Incidents of anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic, Wang said, introduced a generation of Asian Americans to language about racial trauma but not necessarily about other forms of brutality, such as domestic violence, which became a point of discussion in response to the Monterey Park shooting. She said that race is just one factor, complicated by other issues such as gender, national origin, and immigration status.

At this point, it can feel as though there are more questions than answers when it comes to understanding these shootings. Still, the experts I spoke with emphasized the importance of providing more mental health care to Asian American communities, as well as the need for them to “step back and recharge in whatever way you need to,” as Wang put it. “I think we have to be aware of our limits and our boundaries,” Catipon added, recommending the AAPA’s list of resources for help. “Sometimes it’s okay to find things that give us joy … I would just encourage people, if they’re noticing that they’re having a hard time functioning, to get support. [Asking for help] doesn’t mean that you’re weak. It doesn’t mean anything like that if you’re affected by these things. It means you’re human.”