Entomologist Michael Raupp is enjoying Swarmageddon. The giant batch of cicadas began emerging from the ground in late April and will be heard in some northeastern states through June. “You see the insects in a mad, desperate dash for the trees so they can survive and mate,” Raupp says. “Birds and squirrels will be eating them. It’s life, it’s death, it’s romance. It’s a massive display of Mother Nature’s wonder — in my opinion, at its best.” Likewise, scientists get only so many chances to study each cohort, or brood, of cicadas. This particular cycle of 17-year cicadas... (p. 32)

DENVER — “I’m a little tired of the cold,” Geoff Hargreaves says with a sigh. No surprise there: Hargreaves works in a deep freeze — 38 degrees Celsius below zero (−36° F). As curator of the National Ice Core Laboratory, his job is to keep ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland frozen. These cylinders — which would stretch more than 17,000 meters if laid end-to-end — are precious. They contain records of past climate and atmospheric chemistry, trapped in tiny bubbles that formed thousands of years ago and froze in chronological layers like tree rings. Melting is the enemy, ... (p. 32)

Give a man a fish and he’ll have a seafood supper. Teach a man engineering principles and he could start an aquafarm, devise a better net or fishing pole or maybe even come up with an entirely new way to combat chronic fishlessness. That’s the premise behind a nonprofit organization called Future Scientist that teaches people to use basic science and engineering to solve problems — and then encourages them to teach others to do the same. The group is the brainchild of biological engineers Gautham Venugopalan (below, right) of the University of California, Berkeley and Richard Novak (bel... (p. 36)

Graduate student Craig Ulrich carried out his first published research project not in a university lab, but as a prison inmate. In 2004 Ulrich accidentally shot and killed a college classmate. Convicted of first-degree manslaughter (which in Washington state means a death caused through recklessness), he ended up at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Wash. His college background in biology made him a perfect candidate to work in the facility’s composting program, set up by Evergreen State College in nearby Olympia. Data he collected appeared in a 2009 research paper showing t... (p. 32)

Harvard geneticist Joseph Pickrell is part of a new generation of scientists talking about their data not just over the lab bench, but in conversations online. Pickrell uses the Internet to open himself, his research and his thoughts about others’ work to public scrutiny. Pickrell (pictured) analyzes genetic data from people living today to reconstruct ancient evolutionary relationships. But he wouldn’t expect his research subjects to make their genetic secrets public if he wasn’t willing to do so himself. “I feel pretty strongly that genetic data isn’t scary,” he says. To prove ... (p. 32)

Baseball’s resident physicist. (p. 32)

Best known for its role in crafting and commanding spacecraft such as Curiosity, JPL is also home to decades’ worth of accumulated oddities. (p. 32)

Rare disease sets mom’s research agendaWhen a child is diagnosed with a mysterious disease, the lives of everyone in the family change. But when Leslie Gordon’s son Sam was diagnosed with a rare premature aging disease, the lives of dozens of families changed. As a pediatrician and medical researcher at Brown University, Gordon set out to learn what caused her son’s condition and how to treat it. Sam looked fine when he was born, but he didn’t grow the way other babies do. His primary teeth didn’t come in on time, and he seemed a bit stiff. Doctors couldn’t find anything in partic... (p. 32)

Tackling women’s pro football. (p. 32)

After finishing his Ph.D. on glass formation, chemical physicist Patrick Charbonneau thought he’d never study the material again. But something kept nagging him: In some experiments, materials would unexpectedly morph into glass, solid as a rock but molecularly disordered like a liquid. The results didn’t match with glass-formation theory, but they were easy to dismiss as a fluke. “If I want to have a career,” Charbonneau remembers thinking, “there’s no way I should work on this problem. It’s ridiculous.” Other researchers had found mismatches between the theory of how glasses... (p. 4)