Some of the newest and most exciting discoveries from Mars will be brought to you by the letter L. Roger Wiens, professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences in the College of Science at Purdue University and an expert in Mars robotics technology, led the team that built SuperCam, one of Mars rover Perseverance’s most innovative and effective tools. Recently, SuperCam used its laser to etch the first letter – L – on the Martian surface to learn more about Mars’ lost magnetic field.

Birds migrate and bees pollinate. Flies just fly around. And get overlooked, mostly. But unbeknownst to most humans, flies also pollinate. And some even migrate.

Most humans are familiar with the notion of being “hangry:” of being so hungry a person becomes irritable, angry, or even unreasonable. Most humans, however, don’t resort to cannibalism. That’s not true for all the animals on the planet.

Star birth, star death, exoplanets, galaxies and a window that looks back to the universe 13.1 billion years ago: That’s what the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) delivered when it released its first handful of scientific images on July 12. As he has from the beginning, astronomer Danny Milisavljevic watched with fellow astronomers, witnessing the universe unfold before his eyes. “These images were incredible,” Milisavljevic said. “JWST just launched a new era of space exploration. The images pushed the envelope of my understanding – of my ability to even explain what I was seeing. These images reveal all sorts of structures that we have never seen before and led me to ask all sorts of questions that I had never even thought to ask.”

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.