What We're Reading

Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by astronomers, only a handful are in their formative years. These baby planets provide important clues to planet formation, including the process by which our own solar system came into existence.

This article looks at philanthropic efforts on behalf of basic research, including those of the Simons Foundation. They span a range of modalities, from assistance for individual investigators to the establishment of research institutes.

April 25 was the day astronomers said goodbye to the old Milky Way they had known and loved and hello to a new view of our home galaxy. NPR describes the first day of CCCA's Gaia workshop.

As a major new catalogue of our galaxy's stars from the Gaia space mission reverberates through the scientific community, astronomers are rushing to make revolutionary discoveries through such efforts as a dawn-to-dusk data hack-a-thon at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics.

A study of two-billion-year-old salt found that the rise in oxygen that occurred about 2.3 billion years ago, known as the Great Oxidation Event, was much more substantial than previously indicated: "Instead of a trickle, it was more like a firehose."

The geneticist at Harvard Medical School has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient people. His findings trace the prehistoric migrations of our species.

A multi-institutional team has broken its own record and given the cosmology community a world-class simulation, called Illustris, to study how the universe formed.

“Stephen was far from being the archetype unworldly or nerdish scientist — his personality remained amazingly unwarped by his frustrations and handicaps.”

A small fleet of long-range autonomous underwater vehicles will collect and archive seawater samples automatically, enabling scientists to track and study ocean microbes in unprecedented detail.

She is being recognized for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, which revolutionized our understanding in the nature of gravity and the fundamental evolution of the universe.