“Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars.” This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt, she discovered the Kuiper belt, vastly increasing the number of known objects in the solar system. At the same time, her research helped reduce the number of planets in our solar system to eight. Yes, she shares responsibility for [...]

Eleven years ago, as a Fulbright scholar, Nina Dudnik did a year-long research stint at the Africa Rice Center in Côte d’Ivoire, where her colleagues meticulously rinsed out disposable items, such as pipette tips, so they could re-use them. Soon after, when she went to graduate school at Harvard University, United States, she saw that serviceable equipment and laboratory equipment were routinely thrown out whenever laboratories upgraded their inventories. Along with a small band of fellow students who had also worked in resource-poor laboratories, Dudnik [...]