The Latest Breaking News from National Science Foundation

You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you’ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food – unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments and the like – all dressed up with no place to go, except the back of the refrigerator. With luck, hungry relatives will discover…

A biodiversity crisis is reducing the variety of life on Earth. Under pressure from land and water pollution, development, overhunting, poaching, climate change and species invasions, approximately 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.

The 2022 U.S. midterm elections ran relatively smoothly and faced few consequential accusations of fraud or mismanagement. Yet many Americans don’t trust this essential element of a democracy.

Astronomers have been looking into the Sun's glare, a hiding place for planet-killer asteroids. Recently the team spotted two rocks that fit the title.

The Supreme Court’s historically low public standing has prompted a national conversation about the court’s legitimacy. It’s even drawn rare public comment from three sitting Supreme Court justices. What’s referred to by experts as the problem of “judicial legitimacy” may seem abstract, but the court’s faltering public support is about…

Henry David Thoreau, the environmental philosopher and author of “Walden”, was a keen observer of seasonal change. In 1862, for example, he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly:

The National Science Foundation has announced it will not rebuild a renowned radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which was one of the world’s largest until it collapsed nearly two years ago

The U.S.'s pre-eminence among the world's top research universities continues to diminish, according to a new global ranking, while Chinese universities are on the rise, producing a greater quantity and higher quality of research than ever before.

Arati Prabhakar has been sworn in as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and assistant to the president for science and technology after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, two months following her nomination by President Joe Biden. As the director of OSTP and assistant to the…

A federal report that, in the words of its key finding, “sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking are problems in the U.S. Antarctic Program community” – and that efforts “dedicated to prevention [are] nearly absent” – drew attention around the world. But as a historian of Antarctic science, I did…

A new multibillion-dollar federal agency was created with a goal of supporting “the next generation of moonshots for health” in science, logistics, diversity and equality. And the agency now has it’s first leader, as President Joe Biden announced Renee Wegrzyn as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health,…