New Horizons in Science

The scandal over lead contamination of the Flint, Mich., water system, left in its wake huge questions for public officials, scientists and journalists. The Flint situation was exposed and addressed through the work of a vocal citizen, a journalist working for the ACLU, and a small group of scientists in Virginia.

Scientists' attempts to harness the immune system to fight cancer have met with mixed and often disappointing results. Tyler Curiel's lab is one of those working to find out why. He was the first to show that age makes a major difference in how the immune system responds to immunotherapy; an experiment showed that a therapy that beat back melanoma in young mice failed in old mice because of a specific additional component of the older animals' immune response.

Across America, environmental contamination is a persistent concern for many lower-income neighborhoods. Monica Ramirez-Andreotta focuses her research on contamination that affects everyday life. Typically scientists recruit "citizen scientists" to explore questions scientists ask. By contrast, Ramirez-Andreotta engages residents in motivating and framing research questions and policy issues, collecting data and, ultimately, reporting on the work to policymakers and working together to mitigate risks.

Michele Johnson wonders how different parts of an animal's body work together to produce behavior. She has zoomed in on an area of behavior at the center of evolution—courtship and copulation—and a group of species where just a few body parts are used. In male anole lizards, a single muscle controls courtship displays, and just two muscles control the paired copulatory organs called hemipenes.

Space fans celebrated in July as NASA's Juno probe screamed toward Jupiter and slipped flawlessly into orbit around the monster planet after a 5-year journey from Earth. As science writers register for ScienceWriters2016, Juno is looping through two broad elliptical orbits, taking preliminary scientific measurements and preparing to move into tighter loops. Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the mission, will provide an update as Juno prepares to change orbits.

ScienceWriters2016 will wrap just a week before the US presidential election. For the first time, climate change—and the divide between the two parties and their candidates—has emerged as a top-level issue in the national campaign.

A malaria infection isn't just a war between the victim's immune system and a parasite. When the parasites' genomes are sequenced, scientists often find many genotypes competing within a single victim. The parasites' dauntingly complex community structure is one of the factors driving the continuing emergence of resistance to antimalarial drugs.