Astronomers now have a better understanding of how stars progress, thanks to NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope that has detected numerous pulsars by the gamma rays they emit.

Tagged: NASA, pulsar, space, On Campus, Humanities & Sciences

About three times a second, the rotating corpse of a 10,000-year-old star sweeps a beam of gamma rays toward Earth. This object, known as a pulsar, is the first one known to "blink" at Earth only in gamma rays, and was discovered by an orbiting observatory launched in June with significant involvement from researchers at Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Tagged: NASA, SLAC, space

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell specializes in understanding risk—going behind the scenes to perceive threats and trying to prevent them from materializing. "If we're doing our job well, nobody hears about it," says Paté-Cornell. It's a kind of analysis that has applications far from engineering itself, from detecting terrorists' plans to fighting infectious diseases to predicting human error in a variety of situations.

Tagged: multidisciplinary, NASA, risk, terrorism, International Issues, Engineering