Arupa Ganguly is pleased with the outcome of her day in court. “I’m ecstatic,” she says. “I feel like a tiger that has been released from a cage.” 06.14.13 | more >>

Periodical cicadas may be marvels of synchrony, but they’re also marvelously out of step, usually years off, with much of their own species. 06.07.13 | more >>

Tom Siegfried

PHOENIX — Hate driving your car when you could be a passenger? A self-driving vehicle that one day could chauffer human occupants around town brought its inventor, a 19-year-old Romanian computer scientist, the top prize — and $75,000 — this week at the world’s premier high school research competition. 05.20.13 | more >>

Intel/Chris Ayers

Barack Obama offered yet another argument about why the current federal-budget stalemate is so risky: “[T]he sequester, as it’s known in Washington-speak — it’s hitting our scientific research.” As things now stand, “we could lose a year, two years of scientific research as a practical matter, because of misguided priorities here in this town.”That was the president’s warning ... 04.30.13 | more >>

SSP

Vitamin D seems to be living up to high expectations. A spate of 2013 studies has found that the vitamin may yield benefits in groups ranging from pregnant women to members of the military to kids in a dentist chair. 04.08.13 | more >>

I can remember only two science projects from my teenage years. One was a tennis ball launcher made of rubber tubing and plywood. The other was a bottle rocket with a cardboard nose. I think my dad built both of them. 03.11.13 | more >>

M. Rosen

At 5 a.m. local time today (January 28), U.S. researchers successfully completed boring a 30-centimeter-diameter hole through 800 meters of Antarctic ice, piercing into Lake Whillans. It’s one of a series of interconnected subglacial lakes that periodically fill and drain. Scientists estimate that the lake’s water, which flows beneath the Whillans Ice Stream, has not had contact with the ... 01.28.13 | more >>

WISSARD program/NSF

A senator and a scientist walk into an elevator. If the scientist happens to be Navneeta Pathak or Kiani Gardner, science funding might also get a lift. 12.19.12 | more >>

ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA — Any day now, a team of 40 scientists and support personnel expects to begin shoveling ice and snow into a melting bin. Over the next 24 to 36 hours, they’ll send the resulting 90 degree Celsius water down through a clean hose that they’ll unspool from above. They’ll use the warm, high pressure jet to bore a 30-centimeter hole through 83 meters of ice. ... 12.15.12 | more >>

J. Raloff

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s not every day that scientists get to hobnob with a Hollywood director — especially one famous for bossing around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio and Zoe Saldana. 12.11.12 | more >>

Many people of a certain age (like my folks) enjoy flying south to warmer climes when winter weather threatens. I’m also flying south this December — but not to warm up. As a guest of the National Science Foundation, I’ll be checking out summer in the really deep South: Antarctica. Temps expected at certain sites I’m scheduled to visit, such as the South Pole, threaten to surpass the ... 12.06.12 | more >>

J. Raloff

Science is serious business, but some geneticists have found a way to make sitting through scientific lectures a little more fun. 11.08.12 | more >>

Editor’s Note: Science News intern Tanya Lewis is attending the neuroscience meeting in New Orleans on a travel award from the Society for Neuroscience. 10.17.12 | more >>

Half of this hotel room looks like the inside of a Home Depot after the store has been lifted, shaken really hard, and set back down. The other half of the room, where a group of five middle-schoolers silently cluster, holds the results of their afternoon’s work — an elaborate, giant Rube Goldberg–style mousetrap. Strands of dominoes feature prominently in the design, of course, but so ... 10.01.12 | more >>

BEIJING — A cast of exotic, and sometimes mysterious, astrophysical objects quietly took center stage during the first session of the pulsar symposium at the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly meeting on August 20. 08.21.12 | more >>

Charles Elachi is busy this Friday morning. It’s three days before the Curiosity rover is set to land on Mars, and the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is cheerfully making tracks between a NASA social media event and his office on JPL’s campus. 08.04.12 | more >>

Though nearly empty Thursday afternoon, mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be packed with more than 100 people when the Mars rover Curiosity is set to touch down this Sunday, August 5. 08.03.12 | more >>

N. Drake

On Sunday night, NASA will attempt to land its newest, biggest rover in a massive crater on Mars — and if everything goes well, Ryan Anderson will get to find out whether he’s right or wrong. 08.01.12 | more >>

AGU

A British-Australian research team has just found coral trout living on the south side of the Great Barrier Reef sporting dark skin lesions. Fifteen percent of the affected populations at two sites bore brown-black growths, some of them raised and almost scablike. The authors conclude that they’ve stumbled onto an epidemic of melanoma — a type of skin cancer — in iconic and ... 08.01.12 | more >>

M. Heupel/Australian Inst. of Mar. Sci.

I read with sadness this week that Weekly Reader is about to disappear.

Earlier this year, Scholastic Classroom Magazines purchased the publication, one that had been an iconic source of news (throughout my elementary-school years, anyway). The buyer already had 28 subject-specific publications. It will now begin “combining the features of Weekly Reader into the Scholastic classroom magazines,” says Cathy Lasiewicz, with Scholastic in New York City. “There ... 07.26.12 | more >>

Though she didn’t know it, I spent many evenings with Sally Ride in the 1980s. Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space, died July 23 at age 61 after fighting pancreatic cancer for 17 months. But decades ago, she often sent me gently to sleep, inviting my young mind to follow her high into the microgravity skies above Earth.Many childhood evenings involved my dad climbing ... 07.24.12 | more >>

Drake family