August 9, 2026

Like many fields, STEM has historically excluded many populations — and it continues to do so. It is worth noting, however, that the landscape has shifted significantly over the past several decades, driven by the work of scientists, educators, policymakers, and... click here to read more!

July 5, 2026

Meet Justin, a postdoctorate fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. In this role, he studies taxonomic and geographic systems to uncover how geological processes have shaped present-day faunal assemblages.

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July 2, 2026

If you've looked at research lab websites or read through program descriptions, you've probably encountered the term "PI,” which is short for Principal Investigator. You can find PIs anywhere in research: they run labs, get named on grants, and appear at the top of academic department pages... click here to read more!

June 30, 2026

Meet Alli, a program manager at the Perry Initiative. In this role, she helps introduce thousands of young women to STEM careers and connects them with the mentors and experiences that helped shape her own journey.

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June 29, 2026

Meet Fernando, the manager of the Science Research Mentoring Program (SRMP) at The American Museum of Natural History. There, he helps mentor the next generation of scientists by making research more accessible and inclusive.

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June 24, 2026

What exactly comes to mind when you hear the term ‘black hole?’ You might think it’s an astronomical vacuum of sorts, or maybe just some wormhole that facilitates transportation across the galaxy. Both of these assumptions, however,... click here to read more!

June 18, 2026

On June 18, 1983, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying mission specialist Dr. Sally Ride. Notably, this mission was one that would go down as a leap for women across the world. At 32 years old, Ride became the first American woman to travel to space... click here to read more!

June 12, 2026

Did you know that there is a second, invisible curriculum that is not taught directly in schools? Specifically, this curriculum is a collection of unofficial or unspoken sets of rules that some students seem to already know while others stay in the dark. That unwritten rubric is... click here to read more!

June 2, 2026

If you've ever taken a basic science class, you've heard the term "control group." But in the context of real research, the control group is one of the most important design decisions in any experiment. In experimental design, understanding what controls are and why they’re necessary are... click here to read more!

May 23, 2026

On May 23, 1785, Benjamin Franklin (a name you have likely heard numerous times), wrote a letter to his friend George Whatley describing a new invention he had devised to solve a deeply personal problem. Interestingly, Franklin was nearsighted and also farsighted, which meant... click here to read more!

May 21, 2026

In almost every movie involving a scene with a laboratory, mice are often squealing in the background. Even in scientific literature mice are showing up in studies covering all sorts of diseases. But why? Of course we wouldn’t want to use human beings as test subjects... click here to read more!

May 12, 2026

On May 12, 1941, German engineer Konrad Zuse stood before an audience in Berlin and demonstrated the Z3. For the first time in history, a machine that was both fully automatic and fully programmable existed. Despite this incredible feat, at the time of its breakthrough... click here to read more!

May 5, 2026

"It’s correlation, not causation!" You've probably heard this phrase before; it's practically a cliché at this point. But clichés become clichés because they're true, and this one is pretty critical for understanding how scientific evidence actually works. Misunderstanding the difference... click here to read more!

April 24, 2026

On April 24, 1990, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built: the Hubble Space Telescope. The following day, Hubble was deployed into orbit approximately 340 miles above Earth... click here to read more!

April 4, 2026

If you’ve already started looking into research programs or internships, then you’ve probably seen the terms “wet lab” and “dry lab.” What exactly does it mean, though, for a lab to be wet or dry? For someone who has never been in a laboratory setting before... click here to read more!

March 27, 2026

On March 27, 1855, Canadian geologist and physician Abraham Gesner received a U.S. patent for kerosene, a refined petroleum product that would eventually transform the way millions of people light up their homes, businesses, and streets. Gener's patent is one of the most significant... click here to read more!

March 25, 2026

Meet Sabia, a 17 year old senior high student at the Bronx High School of Science interested in pursuing a career as a family physician.

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March 24, 2026

Meet Colin Burdette, a graduate student at Weill Cornell Medicine, where he develops chemical tools to study protein interactions. 

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February 18, 2026

Meet Claire, a 19 year old college freshman at Cornell University, who is studying at the Duffield School of Engineering.

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February 3, 2026

If you've ever heard a scientist say "this hasn't been peer-reviewed yet" or seen a news headline about a study "published in a peer-reviewed journal," you might have wondered what peer review actually is and why it seems to carry so much weight... click here to read more!

January 22, 2026

Scientific papers are not written for general audiences, but scientists in the same field, who share years of specialized vocabulary. For anyone, nevertheless a high school student reading one for the first time, the experience is pretty overwhelming. With anything, though... click here to read more!

January 9, 2026

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and, while wearing his signature black turtleneck, told the audience he was going to introduce three revolutionary products. The first was a widescreen iPod with touch controls... click here to read more!

December 11, 2025

On December 11, 1844, a Connecticut dentist named Horace Wells sat down in a dentist's chair and had one of his own teeth extracted while breathing nitrous oxide. Remarkably, he felt no pain! This was the first time in history that an inhaled gas had been successfully used... click here to read more!

December 2, 2025

You've probably seen the words “statistically significant” in newspaper headlines about scientific studies. "Scientists find statistically significant link between X and Y." While it sounds like concrete proof has been identified, “statistically significant” doesn’t truly mean... click here to read more!

November 30, 2025

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public as a free research preview. Within the first five days, it had over one million users. Within two months, that number had grown to 100 million, making it the fastest-adopted consumer application in history... click here to read more!

November 4, 2025

If you've been accepted into a research program, mentorship opportunity, or are starting any kind of independent research project, there's a good chance someone will ask you to do a literature review at some point early in the process. For many students, this request lands with plenty of confusion... click here to read more!

October 21, 2025

If you've ever seen a research paper that involved human participants like a survey, a clinical trial, a psychological study, you may have noticed a line in the Methods section that says something like "this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board" or... click here to read more!

September 23, 2025

Over the past decade, a rather uncomfortable finding has emerged from across multiple scientific disciplines: a startling number of published research findings cannot be replicated. If you run the same study again with a different group of participants, you get different results... click here to read more!

August 29, 2025

On August 29, 1831 English scientist Michael Faraday first made one of the most consequential experimental discoveries in the history of physics: he demonstrated that a changing magnetic field could generate an electrical current. This principle is known as electromagnetic induction and is... click here to read more!

August 12, 2025

In the popular imagination, the educational pathway in STEM is relatively linear: you go through high school, then college, attend graduate school, and finally start your career. The reality, however, is much less straight-forward. Gap years are periods of time... click here to read more!

July 1, 2025

Here's something most people outside of science don't know: a huge proportion of research that gets conducted never makes it into a published paper. Plenty of studies sit in file drawers, exist only as conference posters, or simply get abandoned halfway through. This phenomenon... click here to read more!

June 3, 2025

If you ask most people what a hypothesis is, you'll probably get something along the lines of: "an educated guess." While that is technically true, that answer only covers part of what a hypothesis actually does in real research. It's also worth clearing up... click here to read more!

May 27, 2025

Almost everyone has heard of independent and dependent variables, no matter the setting. But, given the similarity in orthography, many people tend to mess them up, despite repeated memorization. Something that helped me keep track is taking the terms literally... click here to read more!

April 22, 2025

You'll see all three of these behind researchers' names constantly once you start reading faculty bios or lab websites, and all of them were the product of very different training paths with different day-to-day routines. A PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) is a research-focused doctorate... click here to read more!

April 6, 2025

On April 6, 1938, a 27-year-old DuPont chemist named Roy Plunkett opened a cylinder of gas in his laboratory at the Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey and found something unexpected. The cylinder, which should have contained pressurized gaseous tetrafluorothylene... click here to read more!

March 18, 2025

The word "conference" can sound intimidating. At first, they might seem like they are. Stepping into a room full of experts may seem daunting, but conferences are actually one of the more approachable parts of science culture. They’re also absolutely not off-limits to students... click here to read more!

March 4, 2025

A p-value is the probability of seeing results as extreme as yours (or more extreme) if there were actually no real effect at all. In other words, if the null hypothesis were true. It is not, despite extremely common misuse, the probability that your hypothesis is correct... click here to read more!

February 11, 2025

Every dollar spent in a research setting — lab supplies, equipment, staff salaries, and often stipends for student interns — tends to trace back to a grant. A grant starts with a PI writing a detailed proposal explaining exactly what they want to study, why it matters, and... click here to read more!

December 17, 2024

On December 17, 1903, on a beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay flat on the lower wing of a fragile wood-and-fabric aircraft called the Wright Flyer and flew approximately 120 feet through the air in 12 seconds. It was the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered machine... click here to read more!

December 4, 2024

Most people think that papers are the only way that research gets published, but not all research actually shows up in the same form. Preprints, for one, are just as common, and is a paper a researcher posts publicly before (or during) the peer review process... click here to read more!

November 19, 2024

Basic research (sometimes called fundamental research) is driven purely by curiosity, expanding what we understand about how something works with no specific practical application in mind at the time. Studying exactly how a particular protein folds, just to understand the mechanism... click here to read more!

October 16, 2024

Animal studies are carefully regulated. The IRB oversees research involving human subjects, but for research using vertebrate animals, that oversight role belongs to a different body: the IACUC, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee... click here to read more!

September 3, 2024

If you land a spot in a research program, there's a good chance your day-to-day mentor won't be the professor who you emailed to get the position. Rather, it would be a postdoc. A postdoc (short for postdoctoral researcher) is someone who has already... click here to read more!

August 27, 2024

On August 27, 1940, engineer Peter Goldmark gave the world's first public demonstration of color television, broadcasting from the top of the Chrysler Building in New York City. Working at CBS Laboratories, Goldmark had spent years developing a system that could... click here to read more!

August 20, 2024

When people imagine "research," they usually picture numbers, a stereotype that aligns with quantitative research: anything measured numerically, like survey ratings, cell counts, reaction times, or growth rates over time. But a huge amount of rigorous science is qualitative... click here to read more!

July 17, 2024

On July 17, 1902, a 25-year-old engineer named Willis Carrier submitted the drawings for what would become the world's first modern air-conditioning system. Interestingly, he wasn’t even trying to keep people cool. Instead, he was trying to solve a printing problem... click here to read more!

July 8, 2024

A meta-analysis takes the idea of literature reviews a step further: instead of just discussing the studies side by side, it statistically combines their actual numerical results into one larger, more powerful analysis. This is more important than you might think... click here to read more!

June 28, 2024

On June 28, 2012, the journal Science published a paper by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier that would go on to be recognized as one of the most consequential biology papers of the 21st century. The paper demonstrated that a bacterial immune system... click here to read more!

June 10, 2024

You’ve definitely heard talk of “developing a resume,” or you’ve even started building one yourself! If that’s the case, then it’s likely that you’ve seen the term "CV" floating around too. While some people refer to the two interchangeably, they’re most certainly not the same document... click here to read more!

April 12, 2024

On April 12, 1981, Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen on a mission designated STS-1. This was a moment filled with tension and anxiety. After all, Columbia was the first spacecraft in history... click here to read more!

March 20, 2024

For many careers, but especially science, there’s an assumption that the "real" path into science involves strong high school grades, a four-year university straight out of high school, and a steady, linear march toward a research career without any detours. Contrary to popular belief... click here to read more!

March 12, 2024

On March 12, 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his supervisor at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The document was titled "Information Management: A Proposal," and it described... click here to read more!

February 28, 2024

On February 28, 1935, chemist Wallace Hume Carothers synthesized the first sample of a new polymer at DuPont's Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Although its technical name was Dolxbexametbylene adipamide, it would eventually be known by something far simpler: nylon... click here to read more!

February 24, 2024

What do you picture when you hear ‘scientist?’ You might imagine heaps of test tubes filled with mysterious, colorful liquids or a white lab coat. But what about the scientist themself? Most students, unfortunately, think of scientists as... click here to read more!