A nearby, infant star teaches us how planets began to form

A stunning new image of ALMA’s…

How fast does the Earth move through the Universe?

And if relativity tells us there’s no such thing as…

How Impassioned Amateurs Built a New Planetary Nervous System

Using cheap sensors and ubiquitous…

The Milky Way’s Most Recent Supernova Was Hidden… Until Now!

1604 is the last time a human saw one…

But I Thought They Laughed at Copernicus…

See more at the Awful Pictures, Terrible Words website

A Seed Knows How to Wait

A sneak peak of my new memoir, ‘Lab Girl’

Human Organ Rentals Gone Wrong

And other titles you didn’t expect to see today

When you hear the phrase “human organ rentals,” you probably think some combination of “I wonder how much they charge,” “I’d hate to meet the repo man,” and “Wait, what?…

Synthetic Minimal Cells and the Search for the Most Basic Life

How simplifying might enable us to…

Why I Go To Revolutions

As of the end of 2015, I’ve been to 3 revolutions (or proto-revolutions?) — in Ukraine, in Spain/Catalonia, and Tanzania/Zanzibar. You can see videos of it on my YouTube site Portraits of a Revolution. Sometimes people ask why. The answer is that I go to revolutions as a scientist, to…