Few birds are as polarizing as house sparrows. Even passionate birders – maybe even especially passionate birders – don’t appreciate their bright eyes, adaptable spirits and omnipresent persistence. But for urban ecologists like Jenny Ouyang, they are the perfect study animal: a way to gain an insight into how birds adapt – or don’t – to human environments.

The earth doesn’t give up its secrets easily – not even in the “Cradle of Humankind” in South Africa, where a wealth of fossils relating to human evolution have been found. For decades, scientists have studied these fossils of early human ancestors and their long-lost relatives. Now, a dating method developed by a Purdue University geologist just pushed the age of some of these fossils found at the site of Sterkfontein Caves back more than a million years. This would make them older than Dinkinesh, also called Lucy, the world’s most famous Australopithecus fossil.

Animals – both herbivores and predators – follow their noses for a broad range of food sources. The principle applies to hunters trying to ferret out easy prey or grazers searching for the richest plants. Now, behavioral ecologists have discovered a way to harness animals’ olfactory ability to protect vulnerable plants and endangered animals.

Black holes are everywhere right now – at the middle of every galaxy, of course, as well as all over the news — thanks to the recent picture taken of the black hole at the center of Earth’s own galaxy.

For two decades, Roger Wiens has built instruments to give humans eyes and a nose on Mars – and now he’s helping add ears as well.

While for humans the constants might be death and taxes, for planets the constants are gravity and collisions. Brandon Johnson studies the latter, using information about impacts to understand the history and the composition of planets, moons, asteroids and meteorites throughout the solar system.

On the big screen, in video games and in our imaginations, lightsabers flare and catch when they clash together.That clashing, or interference, happens only in fiction – and in places with enormous magnetic and electric fields, which happens in nature only near massive objects such as neutron stars. Physicists have discovered that it is possible to produce this effect in the laboratory using a class of novel materials

Well-known for their distinct orange and black stripped coats, tigers are a popular animal to see at the Zoo. Their personalities are as individualistic as their stripes, making them some of the most charismatic animals, too. Smithsonian’s National Zoo is home to two subspecies of tiger: Amur and Sumatran.

The sight of the stars the first time he peered into a telescope floored Danny Milisavljevic. There, right before his eyes, was an entire universe full of planets and details, unexplored and unexpected. Now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University’s College of Science, Milisavljevic is helping bring details from the world’s newest and most powerful telescope: the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which allowed humans to see farther into space and deeper into time.

It is hard enough for humans to interpret the deeper meaning and context of social media and news articles. Asking computers to do it is a nearly impossible task. Even C-3PO, fluent in over 6 million forms of communication, misses the subtext much of the time. Natural language processing, the subfield of artificial intelligence connecting computers with human languages, uses statistical methods to analyze language, often without incorporating the real-world context needed for understanding the shifts and currents of human society. To do that, you have to translate online communication, and the context from which it emerges, into something the computers can parse and reason over.

An active metabolite of vitamin D—(not the over-the-counter version) — is involved in shutting down inflammation, which could potentially be beneficial in patients with severe COVID-19. Previous studies have shown vitamin D’s ability to reduce the inflammation caused by T cells — inflamed cells in the lung characteristic of the most severe and dangerous cases of COVID-19. But as important as understanding that a drug works is understanding the how and the why. This is both to maximize benefit and minimize harm (such as preventing people from eating livestock dewormer or injecting household cleaners into their veins) as well as to pave the way for future treatments.

Guam rails are only the second bird in history – after the California condor – to recover from being extinct in the wild. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute breeds Guam rails for release into the wild, and is making important discoveries about their health and anatomy.

Black-footed ferrets, North America’s only native ferret species, were thought to have gone extinct in 1979. On Sept. 26, 1981, a black-footed ferret was discovered on the Wyoming prairie. From that unlikely occurrence, an entire species began its comeback — one of the most remarkable conservation stories on Earth. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the last black-footed ferret colony, here are five of this miraculous species’ momentous conservation milestones.

Not all heroes wear capes; some wear GPS-enabled backpacks and have feathers. Joe Kolowski is a wildlife ecologist and animal tracking expert with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation. He leads a remarkable project to study the breeding ranges of kestrels by fitting them with tiny tracking backpacks.

Wildlife is priceless, but wildlife conservation is far from free. Being able to assess the value of land is vital to the success of land conservation. In an effort to bolster this understanding, a Kenyan ecologist, Peter Tyrrell of the University of Oxford and the South Rift Association of Landowners, turned to data science methods to mine data from real estate websites to determine how land is valued across Kenya.

On agricultural landscapes, pesticides travel through food webs and can negatively affect local wildlife populations. However, few studies have considered the long-term, cumulative effect of multiple pesticides on avian species, and most are carried out with treated food in a laboratory setting, not in the living landscape. Other studies have analyzed pesticides in the soil and water, but not in the food web itself.

Butterflies and moths have beautiful wings: the bright flare of an orange monarch, the vivid stripes of a swallowtail, the luminous green of a Luna moth. But some butterflies flutter on even more dramatic wings: parts of their wing, or sometimes the entire wing itself, are actually transparent.

Humans have not set foot on the moon for nearly 50 years, but the Apollo moon missions aren’t over. The echoes from Neil Armstrong’s first steps are still helping scientists make giant leaps in understanding the moon’s geology.

Humans can do lots of things that plants can’t do. But plants have one major advantage over humans: They can make energy directly from the sun. That process of turning sunlight directly into usable energy – called photosynthesis – may soon be a feat humans are able to mimic to harness the sun’s energy for clean, storable, efficient fuel. If so, it could open a whole new frontier of clean energy.