White dwarf planet remnants survive long enough to ‘tune in’ to their radio waves
artist's impression of dead planet orbiting white dwarf

Signals from mostly destroyed planets can be heard on Earth, providing important information about how solar systems age.

How many Earth-like planets are around sun-like stars?
Artist's impression of NASA's Kepler space telescope
Evidence found for cloaked black hole in early universe
field of stars

A team of astronomers has discovered the first evidence of a highly obscured black hole existing only 850 million years after the Big Bang.

How to restore a coral reef
healthy and bleached coral

New guidelines could enable corals to adapt to changing environments and help restore declining populations.

Maintaining shelf-stable drugs
diagram of phase separation

New model describes phase separation that spoils antibody solutions

Parasitic plants use stolen genes to make them better parasites
dodder strangles

Some parasitic plants steal genetic material from their hosts and use the stolen genes to become better parasites.

NSF mid-scale award sets off the first extension of IceCube
Sun setting behind the IceCube Lab at the South Pole. The Antarctic detector that identified the first likely source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays, is getting an upgrade that will extend its scientific capabilities to lower energies. Credit: Kathrin Mallot, IceCube/NSF
Finding deletions and duplications in the human genome: Machine learning for diagnosis of genetic variations
A random-forest, machine-learning method for identifying copy number variation from exome-sequencing data. A forest of hundreds of decision trees is trained on a validated set of genetic deletions and duplication, the model built from these trees can then be used to accurately identify copy number variation in sample exome-sequencing data. Credit: Girirajan Laboratory, Penn State
Game theory shows why stigmatization may not make sense in modern society
Before modern medicine, stigmatization may have been the most effective way humans had for dealing with the spread of infectious diseases. Now, a game theory model supports the idea that stigmatizing people who have a disease may cause more harm than good. Image credit: Pixabay
Linking health and population patterns via satellite
Penn State biologist Nita Bharti and geographer Andrew Tatem compared satellite images of nighttime lights over time to estimate population changes in places like Niamey, capital of the West African nation of Niger, and then correlated those changes with public-health records of measles outbreaks. Credit: Penn State
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