Think back to your class trips to the planetarium. Remember the awe-inspiring view of all those stars and heavenly bodies projected onto the ceiling? Now imagine charting stars and celestial gases in about 40,000 nearby galaxies. That’s the responsibility facing Mason astronomer Jessica Rosenberg. She’s been creating an enormous dataset — a huge extragalactic survey — which she and her colleagues will use to help answer fundamental questions facing astronomers today. One the major...

For more than 20 years, anthropologist Susan Crate has traveled to northeastern Siberia to work with a group of native horse and cattle breeders.

Crate, an assistant professor of human ecology in Mason’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy, is currently working on a project that focuses on how global climate change affects Siberian natives’ livelihood and culture.

Fluent in Russian and Sakha (the Turkic language of the Sakha people) Crate has...

The nuclear power industry is trying to sell itself as the solution to climate change. Nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide and produces a lot of electricity, and is therefore a fairly clean and efficient energy source.

But nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to build, and the ones currently operating are old. The waste from a nuclear reaction is highly toxic and in need of special, safe storage. Not to mention, many people shudder when they hear the term...