Say you have a curious kid and you want to confirm the planet is round to, you know, show off how experimental results can verify mathematical ones.    If you are with the Brooklyn Space Program group, you build your own spacecraft, of course.

But it isn't that easy.    You can put a camera on a balloon, sure, but your camera needs to survive 100 MPH winds, temperatures of -60, speeds of 150 MPH and maybe a water landing.  To find it if it does land safely, you need to have a GPS attached that transmits coordinates to a cell tower.

Here is their story:

A persistent hypothesis is that perhaps life did not 'originate' on Earth at all, perhaps its building blocks came from space.

In April, the public, fed by astronomy's runaway hype train, were excited by the discovery of water on an asteroid - but it was exciting, it was just the conjecture that followed was a little cloying.

Publishing is evolving and, of the big publishers (The Lancet, Cell, etc.), no one is more forward-thinking than Elsevier.   

They recently announced Article-Based Publishing, their new way to  publish articles as final (and citable) without needing to wait for the full journal to be complete.  Article-Based Publishing is the assigning of final citation data on an article-by-article basis, separate from production of the journal issue.

A new study published in Cell Metabolism says it has increased the lifespan of middle-aged mice by 12% using a combination of three amino acids as supplements.

Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) have extended life span in yeast but this is the first time these amino acids have been shown to work in mammals, the researchers say. 

I had no idea there were entire languages left to discover.   Then again, I had no idea there was a group called the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages either, but exist they both do.  
The linguists, doing a project for National Geographic, thought these people in the northeast corner of India were speaking a dialect of the Aka culture of the Himalayas - but it turns out they have a different vocabulary and linguistic structure.