What We're Reading

The shutdown, now in its third week, has emptied some laboratories, forced scientists from the field, upended important conferences, imperiled the flow of grant money and disrupted careful planning of time-sensitive studies.

The real journey to the center of the Earth has begun, and scientists are discovering subsurface microbial beings that shake up what we think we know about life.

Fundamental discoveries don’t always have practical uses, but they have soul-saving applications. Times columnist Bret Stephens lays out the importance of cultivating curiosity.

Marc Kastner, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance (of which the Simons Foundation is a founding member), argues that philanthropy plays a small but critical role in supporting research that government may not undertake and that it can fund explorations that might otherwise languish on the idea shelf.

The flyby of Ultima Thule has already cleared up one mystery: why the light reflecting off the snowman-shaped object does not fluctuate, as might be expected from an irregular spinning body. The reason: the rotation axis is pointed at the spacecraft.

University scientists aspire to gain the esteem of their peers but are also terrified of earning their scorn. Such feelings drive U.S. scholarship and make it the envy of the world, argues David Labaree of Stanford University in this essay.

Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed an innovative tool to peer into the secret life of brain cells.

This Nature editorial discusses the value in studying the genome of the legendary Galapagos giant tortoise, which holds clues about longevity.

Sophisticated algorithms can now, for instance, identify a data scientist even if that job title is not listed in the person's profile. Employers may soon have access to a new universe of prospective workers.

“My goal is to solve biological problems,” says Olga Troyanskaya, deputy director of #genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology. Read a profile of Olga and her work in this month's Nature Methods.