All around and inside us, an elab­o­rate dance of mol­e­c­ular vibra­tions is con­stantly taking place.

More than a decade ago, math­e­matics pro­fessor Valerio Toledano Laredo was puz­zling over the rela­tion­ship between the sym­me­tries of macro­scopic and micro­scopic sys­tems when he dis­cov­ered a brand new set of dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions.

The foren­sics lab isn’t nearly as glam­orous as tele­vi­sion would have you think. Jacquelyn Horman would know. The chem­istry major had watched her fair share of the police pro­ce­dural dramas NCIS and CSI: Miami before landing a co-​​op job with the crime lab at the Mesa, Ariz., police depart­ment. The lab work — not glitzy but crit­ical to inves­ti­ga­tions — strength­ened her interest in the field, she said.

We heat up when we’re working hard. Com­puters do, too. And as big data con­tinues to get bigger, we’re asking these machines to work even harder, which means they require more energy than ever.

Seven years ago, physics pro­fessor Latika Mennon’s first grad­uate stu­dent said he wanted to “change the world.”

Ninety per­cent of global health­care and med­ical research money is spent on dis­eases that affect only 10 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, according to Michael Pol­lastri, a pro­fessor of chem­istry and chem­ical biology who spoke at the Col­lege of Sci­ence Col­lo­quium last Friday.

Nearly half a mil­lion chil­dren in the U.S. take anti­de­pres­sants. In 2007, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion released a warning for flu­ox­e­tine, one of the most highly pre­scribed psy­chi­atric med­ica­tions.

Oyster reefs and sandy beaches have his­tor­i­cally bor­dered many pic­turesque coast­lines. But in an effort to pre­vent ero­sion, coastal devel­opers are increas­ingly replacing these living shore­lines with rocks and seawalls.

While dyslexia is most often clas­si­fied as a reading dis­order, it is also well known to affect how indi­vid­uals process spoken lan­guage.

Last week, Nature Mag­a­zine, Genome Research and Genome Biology pub­lished 30 papers on break­through research that will change the face of genetics.

You’re not sure why, but you don’t trust that guy. You wouldn’t give him a buck because you’re pretty sure he wouldn’t return the favor. What is it about him? Can you put your finger on it?

Oxford Dic­tio­naries Online, the online-​​only sub­sidiary of the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, recently added sev­eral words to its data­base that high­light our wide­spread usage of dig­ital lan­guage in everyday con­ver­sa­tion.

As a high school freshman in India, Jigar Mehta started a small non­profit orga­ni­za­tion called Give a Week, which engaged stu­dents in com­mu­nity ser­vice projects for one week each month.