The Planet Hunters

From Gáspár Bakos’ desk at Princeton, he can see everything that happens at his telescopes on three continents. He can see wild burros nuzzle at the cables in Chile, warthogs wander by in Namibia, and Continue Reading →

Telescopes take the universe’s temperature

Two telescopes on a Chilean mountaintop are poised to tell us much about the universe in its infancy. They are surveying the faint temperature fluctuations left over from the explosive birth of the universe, with Continue Reading →

Found in translation: Scholar locates source of 18th-century Quran

In a London archive, Alexander Bevilacqua found it: a medieval copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran. Its aging pages, Bevilacqua knew, contained the original source for a highly influential 18th-century English translation of Continue Reading →

Activism Shapes Africa Scholar

Leonard Wantchekon’s education began  as a young child in his home village of Zagnanado, in the West African nation of Benin, where elementary school classes gave way to long soccer games and evenings of storytelling Continue Reading →

Far from random, evolution follows a predictable pattern

Evolution, often perceived as a series of random changes, might in fact be driven by a simple and repeated genetic solution to an environmental pressure, according to new research. “Is evolution predictable? To a surprising Continue Reading →