A tour of the Avery Brewing Company in Boulder, Colorado reveals industrial-scale steel fermentation tanks, a laboratory capable of genetic testing and even a hop cannon to add hops without exposing the beer to oxygen.

Yet, the brewery’s latest project is decidedly low tech: making beer as it might have been brewed thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, Egypt and Peru. Using ingredients available to ancient peoples and brewing techniques drawn from archaeological evidence and historical texts, Avery’s brewers hope to offer a new taste from the ancient world.​

The three white dots, circled in red in the image above, are three giant gas planets orbiting the star HR 8799, 129 light years from Earth.

Most exoplanets--planets around other stars--that we have discovered have only been detected by measuring the wobble they exert on their star or by detecting a dip in stellar brightness as they pass between Earth of their star. This image is one of a growing number of direct images of exoplanets.

While these three planets have been previously directly imaged by another telescope in 2008, this image is one of the first images released from a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. This instrument, called a chronograph, blocks out the light of the host star, allowing astronomers to not only observe the orbiting planets, but also dissect their light to detect the elements that make up their atmospheres.

This new chronograph on the Subaru telescope, dubbed CHARIS, is one of several new chronographs now being used to observe exoplanets, yielding more and more insights about planets around distant stars. CHARIS is capable of detecting and analyzing gas giants larger than Jupiter around other stars (no chronographs can yet directly detect Earth-sized exoplanets) and will be open for full scientific use in February 2017.

(But still pretty bad!)

The Permian-Triassic extinction event (a.k.a. "The Great Dying") occurred 252 million years ago and is generally considered the largest mass extinction event in Earth's history. By comparing the diversity of fossilized life from before and after the extinction event, the geologic research community has estimated that 90-96% of all species went extinct during a 60,000 year period (plus or minus 50,000 years). The Permian extinction is believed to have been especially severe in the planet's oceans.

However, a new paper, published by Steven Stanley from the University of Hawaii in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges this traditional understanding. Stanley, using no new data but instead a different mathematical method to calculate extinction rates, argues that the Permian extinction may have only wiped out about 81% of all species on Earth.

His new argument centers on background extinction rates–the amount of species going extinct on a regular basis, even when no major extinction event is underway. Stanley calculates the background extinction rate for the middle and late Permian geologic era and then subtracts that from the extinction rates of the Permian extinction event. He also makes several other mathematical adjustments, but, essentially, he's discounting species that likely went extinct before the Permian extinction or that would have gone extinct during that time period, even if not major extinction event were happening.

With these calculations, the new rate of extinction during the Permian-Triassic extinction event is approximately 81% of all species. This is still a drastic reduction in biodiversity on Earth, but not as severe as previously thought.

Stanley's idea is certainly new and controversial within the geologic community. It will take time to see how the scientific consensus on "The Great Dying" evolves.

Researchers have lots of fancy ways of measuring ice loss on Greenland, from precise laser mapping to gravity-measuring satellites. These techniques have yielded a fairly reliable measurement of ice loss from Greenland: 2,500 gigatons per year, since 2003.

In this video, I explain the purpose and significance of bird banding research. By placing metal bands on birds, researchers are able to track individual birds over great distance and time, learning much about bird behavior and health.

If you've found a bird band, you can help by reporting it to Bird Banding Laboratory.

Big thanks to the volunteers and staff at Warner Park Nature Center, who helped me film and research this video.

 As a science writer and video producer, I rely upon many online government resources to conduct research. Curious to see how the shutdown had affected other technical and scientific government websites, I found some sites to be almost completely offline and some almost fully functional. 

Here is a summary of my search: a collection of homepages for various technical and scientific government agencies during the shutdown. Using data from the Office of Management and Budget and the Washington Post, I've indicated the percentage of each agency's workforce on furlough.