Inner Workings: Making headway with the mysteries of life’s origins

Inner Workings: Probing cosmic mysteries in a remote desert.

Amid the volcanic range of the windy, otherworldly Atacama Desert, a telescope collects ancient light from the cloudless sky. The international team of cosmologists manning the instrument hopes it will illuminate the conditions of the universe just after its dawn 13.8 billion years ago. Most physicists believe that the universe inflated rapidly, just a fraction of a nanosecond after it came int...

Inner Workings: Orbiting experiment may help decode the mysteries of rubbly asteroids.

Inner Workings: Tarantula tint inspires new ways of making colors.

Inner workings: Roboclam.

Calla Cofield Science Writer Digging in the sand might seem like child’s play, but doing it efficiently has stumped many adult engineers. As is often the case, nature has revealed a superior solution: this time in the Atlantic razor clam, which can burrow into and out of sandy ocean bottoms more efficiently than man-made, mechanical anchors. In 2008, Amos Winter, a professor of mechanical engin...

Inner workings: The strictest biosafety.

In a small town in the middle of Montana, biologists handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. Hamilton, with a population of about 4,500, hosts the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories, one of a few dozen facilities worldwide equipped to deal with disease agents designated the strictest biosafety level 4 (BSL-4). For virologists such as postdoc Darryl...