Life, Earth And Space

David Weintraub's new book explores how leaders in the world's major religions will react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Read More

Conditions on Earth in its first 500 million years may have been cool enough to form oceans of water instead of being hellishly hot. Read More

Mosquito researcher Jason Pitts collects interesting facts and stories about his research subjects, nature’s ultimate bioterrorists. Read More

An international expert on slavery and emancipation during the 18th and 19th centuries was awarded the prestigious Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research during Vanderbilt University’s Fall Faculty Assembly. Read More

The influential Sloan Digital Sky Survey is launching a major new program called SDSS-IV this month, and Vanderbilt astronomers are directly involved. Read More

Professor of Physics Thomas Weiler has been awarded a prestigious Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. Read More

Vanderbilt physicists played a leading role in the latest findings on the nature of the Higgs particle, which explains why objects have weight and mass. Read More

Vanderbilt's John McLean has received Agilent Technology's Thought Leader Award in recognition of his contributions to ion mobility mass spectrometry. Read More

Seth Bordenstein, associate professor of biological sciences, and graduate student Robert Brucker, discovered that the survival of a new hybrid of wasp depended not on their genes but on the microbes that naturally lived on and inside the insects. Read More

This year 21 Vanderbilt Graduate School students have won prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships. Read More

Vanderbilt astronomers have developed a model that predicts the effect that ingesting earth-like planets has on the chemical composition of stars like the Sun -- a capability that can aid in efforts to find Earth-like exoplanets. Read More

A Vanderbilt graduate student has used a focused beam of electrons to create some of the smallest nanowires ever made, which could bring us closer to flexible, paper-thin tablets and television displays. Read More

Cougars may have survived a mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago because they were not particular about what they ate. Read More

Vanderbilt physicist John Wikswo reported significant progress toward creating “homo minutus” – a human-on-a-chip that can be used to test drugs and toxins – on Mar. 26 at the Society of Toxicology meeting in Phoenix. Read More

By shifting evolution into reverse to produce an expensive HIV drug out of a simple sugar, Vanderbilt chemist Brian Bachmann has shown that it may be possible to manufacture exotic and expensive synthetic drugs as easily as brewing beer. Read More

Vanderbilt University has been awarded a Cooperative Agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army Research Office that is worth up to $16.5 million over five years. Read More

The mechanical forces generated by the rhythmic expansion and contraction of cardiac muscle cells play an active role in the initial stage of heart valve formation. Read More

Vanderbilt biologists have discovered that mosquito sperm have a “sense of smell” and that some of same chemicals that the mosquito can smell cause the sperm to swim harder. Read More

A study has found that the time it takes neural networks in the brain to make decisions is remarkably stable regardless of size: a finding that could make it easier to achieve the goal of the President's BRAIN Initiative established last spring. Read More

The popular science magazine Science News has chosen a story featuring research by Vanderbilt's Seth Bordenstein and Robert Brucker as its top science story for the year. Read More