Women consistently score lower than men on common assessments of conceptual understanding of physics but there is no clear reason why.

Controlling for student background and test-taking strategies provides little help and therefore claims that the causes of this gender gap have been determined (gender bias, stereotype threat) lack substance.

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) was launched in early September and arrived in orbit around the Moon in October.

Its mission is to probe the Moon’s environment but it’s also carrying an interesting piece of technology - a new laser terminal. ESA’s Optical Ground Station in Spain’s Canary Islands was upgraded with an advanced laser terminal that can communicate with LADEE and they report that they have received signals from LADEE 400,000 KM away - at a rate many times faster than possible with traditional radio waves - which means 3 stations on Earth are using next-generation space communications.

The Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas, is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy., hurtling toward its doom at more than 540,000 miles per hour.

But that means the impact will happen in approximately 30 million years. Yet when it does, it will set off a spectacular burst of star formation.

All is not lost, though. It would first have to navigate through the halo of hot ionized gas surrounding the Milky Way, and to do that it has a secret weapon: A magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk. 

Astronomers have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth and found the chances to be nearly 100% - and it will be visible from telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.

It's said that being an astronaut is no longer a bold endeavor. The job works program nature of NASA and a no-risk approach to missions by government has meant a drop in prestige among the public. It used to be risky and that captured the public's imagination.

Some day, if presidents stop canceling the space programs of their predecessors, man may leave orbit again, and astronauts will gain some new respect, because even if the mission is successful astronauts are paying a price - their cells are aging faster in microgravity.

Head Start, the nation's largest federally funded early childhood education program, which serves nearly one million low-income children, has a problem.

Women employed under the program report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems, according to scholars who created the first-ever survey conducted on the health of Head Start staff. 
The anonymous, online survey of staff working in 66 Pennsylvania Head Start programs. Of those who participated in the survey, the researchers focused on 2,122 female respondents, which included managers and classroom teachers of three and four year olds, as well as those making home visits to families of infants and toddlers participating in Early Head Start.