Our adventure started here after an 8-mile hike to Snowmass Lake near Aspen, Colorado

I learned something very important about crop pests in a most unexpected setting – a paradise-like wilderness area in the Colorado Rockies. 

It was the summer of 1978 and I had gotten married the year before. This was my first chance to share a favorite place, the Snowmass/Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, with my wife. 

A new metal matrix composite that is so light that it can float on water, so a boat made of it would not sink despite damage to its structure - and this syntactic foam has good heat resistance too.

Syntactic foams have been around for many years but this is the first lightweight metal matrix syntactic foam, say the researchers from Deep Springs Technology (DST) and the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Their magnesium alloy matrix composite is reinforced with silicon carbide hollow particles and has a density of only 0.92 grams per cubic centimeter compared to 1.0 g/cc of water. Not only does it have a density lower than that of water, it is strong enough to withstand the rigorous conditions faced in the marine environment.

When ants go exploring in search of food they end up choosing collective routes that fit statistical distributions of probability, according to a team of mathematicians who analyzed the trails of a species of Argentine ant. 

It's unknown how flocks of birds, shoals of fish, lines of ants and other complex natural systems organize themselves so well when moving collectively so researchers from Spain and the U.S. analyzed the movements of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile, an invasive species in many parts of the world) while they forage or explore an empty space (a petri dish) and then they proposed a model explaining how they form their routes.

During the short, dreary days of winter, some people feel tired and oversleep, they are depressed and irritable and have trouble concentrating.  But once spring arrives, they say they feel fine.

4 percent of the American public say they suffer from this seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs during the same season each year.

Biologists know that variations in the amount of sunlight a person receives and her or his circadian clock play a role in the disorder and some have proposed that the neurotransmitters serotonin and melatonin may be involved. However, they have not yet identified the underlying neurobiological mechanisms responsible.

"It takes a village to raise a child" is folk wisdom which means that quality communities turn out quality individuals.

It may have seemed like a new idea when First Lady Hillary Clinton said it in the 1990s but ancient societies formed cooperative groups to help raise their children. Why did that happen?

University of Utah anthropologist Karen Kramer and colleagues created an economic model where mothers had one dependent offspring at a time, ended support of their young at weaning and received no help from others and then mapped it to where mothers often have multiple kids who help rear other children.

Before 2009, nearly 4 in 10 cattle ranchers and slaughterhouse in Brazil reported recent deforestation but by 2013, this number dropped to 4 in 100, a 10-fold decrease.

What changed? Policies that were not simply advocated by first world elites that told people in Brazil they couldn't have an economy. Brazil is home to the world’s largest commercial herd of cattle, and its cattle ranchers were once linked to the destruction of huge swaths of rainforest. “Zero-deforestation agreements” put into place in 2009 use market-based strategies to reduce the impact of the beef industry on the environment, a much different methodology than in the past where some would follow guidelines and be penalized economically.

For the last decade, engineers have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. When deploying such autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan but new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more "cognitive" capabilities, enabling humans to specify high-level goals, while the robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals. 

Rydberg atoms, atoms whose outermost electrons are highly excited but not ionized, might be just the thing for processing quantum information. These outsized atoms can be sustained for a long time in a quantum superposition condition (a good thing for creating qubits) and they can interact strongly with other such atoms, making them useful for devising the kind of logic gates needed to process information. 

As scientists, my colleagues and I are often told we need to engage the general public and decision makers, to use our expertise to inform public discourse and debates and to reach a far wider audience than just our professional colleagues.

I very much believe in the importance of doing this. This is, for instance, my 25th article for The Conversation. I’ve also written scores of articles for other popular venues such as New Scientist, Natural History, Yale Environment 360, Australian Geographic, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, among others.