Picture of the day: Hubble Uncovering the Secrets of the Quintuplet Cluster

Credit: ESA/NASA Although this cluster of stars gained its name due to its five brightest stars, it is home to hundreds more. The huge number of massive young stars in the cluster is clearly captured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The cluster is located close to the Arches Cluster and is just 100 […]

Did you hear? Pentaquarks!

If you weren’t too busy waiting for photos of Pluto, you might have heard some news coming out of CERN, Geneva, this week. LHCb, an experiment based at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator there, announced that it had found evidence for a completely new type of particle – a pentaquark. That might sound slightly […]

Episode 9: The (Mars) Schedule Makers

Dearest listeners, we’re so happy to be back with a brand new episode. Today’s guest is Shannon Mihaly, a Mission Operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shannon is a science planner and mission controller for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Want to know how Will.i.am plays a critical* role in NASA operations? Listen and […]

We’re Back!

Real talk: Did you miss us? Because we missed all of you. Truly. Madly. Deeply. Lindsay finally emerged from World Cup madness to jump straight into covering the CONCACAF Gold Cup. And me? It’s been a hectic summer of proposal writing, student wrangling … and learning how to fly RC planes. If you’re living on the Eastern Seaboard, […]

The CRISPR gene revolution, all the cool kids are doing it

CRISPR: It’s all the rage. It’s time to pack up your pog collection and Lisa Frank organizational system. If you want to be cool right now and you happen to be molecular biologist, you should probably be ‘CRISPRing’ something. What is CRISPR? Isn’t that the drawer in my refrigerator where vegetables go to die? Is it even a […]

Working 9 to 5 (and beyond)

June has been a bit (okay, a lot) crazy for us. Lindsay’s day job at Fox Soccer means she’s been working nonstop on the Women’s World Cup. (USA! USA!) My students have been working all year on building their own UAV, and will be down in southern Maryland at the AUVSI Student Unmanned Systems competition […]

Episode 8: The CSI Effect

Who’s your daddy? We’ve got the perfect guest to answer that question. Scientifically, of course. Today’s interview is with Kristy Lenz, a forensic research scientist who develops genetic identity products for Promega. We cover a lot of great topics in this episode, including Maury Povich, Minority Report, and the horrors of hotel bedsheets. Give it […]

Read me: A look at Lindsay’s bookshelf

Not to be outdone by Mumu, I thought it might be fun to share the things that I’ve been reading. I like to try to mix in a few non-fiction books into my mostly fiction book list but sometimes, it’s just so hard to resist a good spy thriller.  So, here we go: Just finished: […]

Episode 7: The Joy of Sex (and Fidelity)

As the great hip hop trio Salt-n-Pepa used to say… Let’s talk about sex. Today’s guest is Dana Weiser, an assistant professor in Human Development & Family Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s Studies at Texas Tech where she teaches human sexuality. On this episode we cover infidelity, domestic abuse, and Jake Gyllenhaal. (He’s unrelated to […]

A peek into Mumu’s bookshelf

In my ongoing quest to convince others that engineers are people too, I thought I’d share a few books from my queue. Work is always full of robots and computers, so my reading list usually skews away from “technical” topics. Don’t worry, we’ll be back with plenty of science-y goodness. But today, let’s take a dive into my […]