To study the planets, someone has to go there: Either a human or a bot launches into space to physically explore other worlds. Scientists who study extraterrestrial materials can’t usually bring their work home. That’s exactly what’s happening this month, though, as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx project brings home pieces of the asteroid Bennu.

Purdue University chemistry professor Jonathan Wilker draws inspiration from the natural world, from his experiences scuba diving to studying shellfish in his lab. He has developed a sustainable adhesive system — an alternative to toxic, permanent, traditional adhesives. (Purdue University photo/Rebecca Robinos)

How do bees choose which flowers to visit? Some bees will visit almost any bloom, while others are more discerning. How, and whether, bees choose to specialize in one kind of flower or pollen is a question entomologists and ecologists have puzzled over for years. Now, a team of scientists is deciphering why some species of bees specialize in visiting one type of plant over others. They concluded that bees who specialize tend to focus on the most abundant species in an ecosystem – at least in the eastern United States.

More Americans than ever are heeding the call of the outdoors – spending time recreating outside and enjoying national parks. Simultaneously, smoky skies are worsening as the size and severity of wildfires increase and adversely affect air quality across the country. Wildfire smoke threatens human health and welfare, especially if humans are exposed to smoke for long periods or while exercising – such as during a hiking trip to one of America’s beloved national parks.

Humans contain multitudes. Each person on the planet contains enough DNA to stretch to Pluto – several times. Studying how all this genetic material works, and especially how genes influence human behavior, is an enormously complicated undertaking – one that’s being made easier by the emergence of massive banks of genetic data and complex data science analysis techniques to parse that data.

Alexandria Johnson does hard science on the most nebulous of subjects: clouds. As an atmospheric scientist, she studies clouds wherever they are: in her lab, on Earth, throughout the solar system and into the galaxy.

A distant star, dying a fiery and dramatic death, torn apart by a supermassive black hole in a forgotten corner of the sky. One of the most luminous, energetic, long-lasting transient objects didn’t blaze through the night sky inspiring legends and launching civilizations. Instead, astronomers, acting as celestial supersleuths, uncovered evidence of the star’s death throes where it had hidden undetected for years in a mass of computer-gathered telescope data.

To gaze at the stars is human. To be able to see them in three-dimensional detail is very nearly divine. Divine vision is what the James Webb Space Telescope has granted earthbound scientists in a new near-infrared, detailed image of Cassiopeia A (Cas A), a stellar remnant – the clouds of gas, dust and other material left behind when a star dies. Danny Milisavljevic, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University, studies supernova remnants and leads a year one research team on the JWST examining Cas A.

Bring up robot-human relations, and you’re bound to conjure images of famous futuristic robots, from the Terminator to C-3PO. But, in fact, the robot invasion has already begun. Devices and programs, including digital voice assistants, predictive text and household appliances, are smart, and getting smarter. It doesn’t do, though, for computers to be all brain and no heart. Computer scientist Aniket Bera is working to make sure the future is a little more “Big Hero 6” and a little less Skynet.

The standard image of Antarctica is vast, featureless sheets of ice and blowing blizzards. But soaring rocky mountains with deep valleys cut like a knife into the continent of Antarctica, evoking the lavish landscapes of the American Southwest’s Monument Valley. Here, ancient rocks reach for the cold blue sky, and here is where Marissa Tremblay, assistant professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at Purdue University, led her team of science experts – all of whom happen to be women.

An imaging agent just approved by the FDA will allow surgeons to identify additional cancerous lesions, which otherwise would have been left behind, in up to 24% more patients during non-small cell lung cancer surgery.

When the rover Perseverance landed on Mars, it was equipped with the first working microphone on the planet’s surface. Scientists have used it to make the first-ever audio recording of an extraterrestrial whirlwind.

Fire ants are a threat that fence lizards never evolved to face. Their typical defense strategy—freezing into place in hopes that the predator goes away—doesn’t work for fire ants. The ants don’t care that the lizard is cleverly blended in; they’re going to bite anyway.

Michelle Thompson is a geologist. But while “geo” means earth, she studies things that are decidedly unearthly, or at least extraterrestrial: the moon and asteroids.

Cancer strikes without warning. Genetics can explain some of it, as well as environmental and lifestyle conditions. But there is no surefire way to predict who will develop cancer. That tragedy holds true for both humans and their closest domestic companions: dogs. A canine cancer scientist at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine is working to take the first steps to make a serious form of cancer in dogs — one with analogues to human health — easier to detect.

What do spaceships, strawberries and vaccines have in common? More than you might think. The short answer is that Purdue University engineer Alina Alexeenko is tinkering with ways to make processes involved in each safer, faster and more effective. The longer answer involves fluid dynamics, the fusion of interdisciplinary science, serendipity and Purdue innovation.

The pyramids of Giza are among the humanity’s most iconic cultural achievements. Archaeologists are now starting to piece together how ancient Egyptians were able to harness their physical environment and the dynamics of the Nile itself to build these incredible monuments.

The tiny bits of plastic that wear off bottles, plastic bags, automotive parts and even cosmetics get into the soil and the water supply. They disrupt chemical cycles, throw off ecosystem health and pollute environments both marine and terrestrial. They eventually also get into the air, where they can damage lungs much more effectively. But for that to happen, they have to be worn away by water or earth and then be launched into the sky by winds. A new study published in Nature Nanotechnology has discovered that a process that happens all over the developed world every day accelerates the airborne dispersal of these micro- and nanoplastic particles, posing a risk to human and environmental health.

In lava caves, threaded below and through the Hawaiian Islands, microbes thrive—bustling, burbling communities of bacteria, microorganisms, and small multicellular organisms.

Chemists discover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock ways to speed up chemical synthesis for drug discovery.