Cary Kendziora had expected the long, slender temperature profile monitor to droop a bit, but not as much as this. As part of a joint project with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Kendziora, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, had designed the device to measure the variation in temperature inside a massive neutrino detector located at the European laboratory CERN.

On March 29, 1979, high in the Quinlan Mountains in the Tohono O’odham Nation in southwestern Arizona, a team of astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory was scanning the night sky when they saw something curious in the constellation Ursa Major: two massive celestial objects called quasars with remarkably similar characteristics, burning unusually close to one another.

Last week at the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Bronzeville, Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of legendary author, journalist, and abolitionist Ida B. Wells, told a packed audience about how four generations of her family have worked to keep her legacy alive. “This is about Black history, it’s about American history,” Duster said. “And we can’t let other people erase us.”

In his art gallery, which inhabits a small brick house at 64th and Dorchester originally purchased by his grandfather in 1946, artist William Hill, a co-curator of the Experimental Station showcase “Environmental Concerns,” explained the project’s concept. “The key is by establishing, fusing art, environment, and community, we begin to raise really important questions and conversations about who we are," Hill said.

Developing quantum computers that can run quantum simulations of quantum physics phenomena is anything but easy. But the payoff for particle physics could be solutions to problems that are virtually impenetrable to classical computers.

For decades, physicists have been searching for dark matter, which doesn’t emit light but appears to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe. Several theoretical particles have been proposed as dark matter candidates, including weakly interacting massive particles—called WIMPs—and axions.

In the airy, sun-filled recreation hall of Lincoln Church, bright graffiti writing declares the space to be the home of Healthy Hood, a fitness and dance studio that offers classes starting at just $5. Murals by local artists depict Malcolm X, Elaine Brown, Elvira Arellano, Oscar López Rivera, Rudy Lozano, and the church’s pastor Emma Lozano. Emma’s daughter Tanya Lozano founded the gym in 2014. Its mission: to address the twenty-year life expectancy gap between underserved communities and higher-income communities.

In 1921, a Swiss miner named Tom Zwiglaar made an extraordinary find. While working in a lead and zinc mine in what is now Zambia, he stumbled across a remarkably preserved skull. The specimen, now known as Kabwe 1 or the Broken Hill Skull, was sent to paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward at London’s Natural History Museum.

More than 14,000 species are listed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Some scientists have called for naming the present geologic epoch the Anthropocene, or “human era,” after the main source of startlingly rapid rates of species extinction and other environmental perturbations.

The discovery demonstrates that the organizer is evolutionarily conserved from amphibians to humans. “For many of us this was always the Holy Grail” of developmental biology, says Guillermo Oliver.

A pilot program announced last month will consider combining announced and surprise inspections.

Back in 2004, Kate Detwiler had her binoculars trained on a guenon monkey perched in a tree deep in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. She was waiting for the monkey to defecate so she could alert her husband and field assistant, James Gray, who was clambering on his hands and knees through the dense undergrowth towards the tree to grab the sample. Minutes later, Gray quickly reemerged from the thicket, empty-handed and white as a sheet.

It was a parent who first approached Romina Ortiz, the COO and vice president of patient advocacy at the Rare Genomics Institute (RGI), about crowdfunding. The mother of Maya Nieder, a developmentally disabled 4-year-old, was looking for a way to raise money for her daughter’s whole-exome sequencing, which reveals the intricacies of protein-coding genes.

Teaching assistants from the Graduate Workers of Columbia University–United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW Local 2110) went on strike Tuesday (April 24). Union members began picketing on the university’s main quad after a 10 AM deadline the union set for the university to agree to enter into bargaining talks passed with no word from the administration.

At the Rally for Science in Chicago, Democratic gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker worked the crowd. “It’s a shame that in 2018 we still have to have a march” for science, he tells The Scientist.

In a petri dish, three Lasius neglectus worker ants surround a cocooned pupa from their own colony’s brood. Tearing into it with their mandibles, the ants remove the pupa from the cocoon, perforate its cuticle, and rip its body apart, dividing it between them. Finally, the workers apply formic acid from their mouths to the eviscerated pupa, leaving behind a heap of crumpled remains. This is no random act of violence.

Universities often build science centers with the hope that they will not only foster research but also have a regional economic impact, but the real-world outcomes are more variable, says Margaret O’Mara, a historian who focuses on high-tech economies at the University of Washington.

Brandon Lloyd took a trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center when he was in middle school and says that he fell in love with human space flight then. He selected Illinois Tech because it was a small school that offered an aerospace engineering degree. Now an average day for Lloyd involves ensuring that there’s enough potable water for the ISS crew--and an exciting day? Investigating space fires.

For the first time, researchers have investigated the infection process of a parasitic fungus that attacks fruit flies and turns them into “zombies.” The fungus, Entomophthora muscae, whose name is derived from the Greek for “insect destroyer,” hijacks the nervous system of an infected host to use it for its own ends.

The mating ritual of whooping cranes is a dramatic affair. Couples dance together, leaping, flapping their wings and calling loudly in a dazzling display of pair bonding. But many months before they settle into what are typically lifelong breeding pairs, these cranes begin quietly spending time with their future partners.