Life, Earth And Space

The results of a new study make it far less likely that KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby’s star, is the home of industrious aliens who are gradually enclosing it in a vast shell called a Dyson sphere, a theory that went viral over the past year. Read More

A team of neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University has taken an important step toward uncovering the mystery behind the California sea lion's prodigious intelligence by conducting the first comprehensive study of their central nervous systems. Read More

Visitors will have the unusual opportunity to safely view the planet Mercury as it transits directly across the face of the sun using Dyer Observatory’s solar telescopes. Read More

Three Vanderbilt students have been recognized in this year’s Goldwater Scholars competition. Marie Armbruster and Jarrod Shilts have been selected as Goldwater Scholars, and Sirui Ma has been awarded an honorable mention. Read More

An astrophysicist and an aerospace engineer who are members of the team developing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018 – will give a free public lecture March 31. Read More

Vanderbilt graduate students demonstrated that they can summarize their 80,000-word theses in less than three minutes using terms that members of the public can understand during this year's Three Minute Thesis competition. Read More

Caleb Scharf, director of astrobiology at Columbia University, will address age-old questions such as "Are we alone?" and "Where do we come from?" in a free public lecture titled "Astrobiology: The Science of Life in the Universe" March 3. Read More

Astronomers have discovered an unnamed pair of stars that sets a new record for both the longest duration stellar eclipse (3.5 years) and longest period between eclipses (69 years) in a binary system. Read More

A team of Columbia University physicists who participated in the first detection of gravity waves will describe the monumental discovery in a free public lecture on campus Thursday, Feb. 18. Read More

The first study that directly compares Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of a significant population of adults of European ancestry with their clinical records confirms that this archaic genetic legacy has a subtle but significant impact on modern human biology. Read More

Application of new micro-analytical techniques have transformed rocks and gravel buried in a special type of soil into a rich source of data about past climates that can help scientists understand how the climate will change in the future. Read More

Associate Professor of Chemistry Jens Meiler has received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany. Read More

A new generation of gamma-ray spectrometer being developed by researchers and students in the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's-to-Ph.D. Bridge program is perfectly suited for detecting valuable minerals hidden within the asteroids, comets, moons and minor planets in the solar system. Read More

An interdisciplinary team of biologists and medical researchers have created a new platform, which they call GEneSTATION specifically designed to leverage the growing knowledge of human genomics and evolution to advance scientific understanding of human pregnancy and translate it into new treatments for the problems that occur when this complex process goes awry. Read More

Vanderbilt chemist helps craft call for major new research initiative to increase our understanding of the invisible world of microbes that surround us. Read More

This December Rick Chappell, research professor of physics and past director of the Office of Science and Research Communications at Vanderbilt, will receive two awards from the American Geophysical Union recognizing his achievements in communicating science to the public and teaching and mentoring students toward careers in geophysics and space physics. Read More

A new class of DNA repair enzyme has been discovered which demonstrates that a much broader range of damage can be removed from the double helix in ways that biologists did not think were possible. Read More

Recent research by Vanderbilt University biologist Ken Catania of the electric eel has revealed that it is not primitive creature that it has been portrayed as. Instead, it has a sophisticated control of the electrical fields it generates that makes it one of the most remarkable predators in the animal kingdom. Read More

The director of forensic investigations for the Italian State Police is giving a free public lecture titled "A physicist at the crime scene" on the Vanderbilt campus on Thursday afternoon, Oct. 29. Read More

A new "geospeedometer" that can measure the amount of time between the formation of an explosive magma melt and an eruption confirms that the process took less than 500 years in several ancient super-eruptions. Read More