What We're Reading

The camp runs from April 16 to May 11, 2018. Application deadline is March 16, 2018.

Nearly 20 years in the making, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, was being designed to investigate the mysterious force dubbed dark energy. But it is in danger of being canceled: President Trump's proposed NASA budget zeroes it out.

In this podcast interview, Ed DeLong, co-director of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE), describes his work, how he got into science and the challenges and the successes of his career.

Despite being tiny, cyanobacteria have a disproportionately large impact on the ecosystem. Kyle Frischkorn, a member of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology, describes the efforts to uncover the secret lives of diverse and remarkable microbes.

The study relates to the theory that our bodies co-evolved with bacteria over millions of years. Over that time, microbes gradually came to help regulate bodily processes from digestion to energy processing to immune defenses.

The road to discovery is littered with judgment calls, educated guesses and assumptions. Some scientists, especially in physics and astronomy, have come to embrace a system of thinking that lays all the subjective laundry out — it's called Bayesian statistics.

High-quality beams could be among the first practical applications of the booming field of topological physics.

Observations from neutron star smashup challenge some theories that include unknown realms.

Only around 40 percent of published findings can be replicated reliably. But replication is not enough. Marcus R. Munafò and George Davey Smith state the case for triangulation.

The breakthrough drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal are undeniable as art. Cajal is considered as important to modern neuroscience as Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur are in their fields.