Carnegie Mellon University Africa, CMU’s College of Engineering location in Kigali, Rwanda, and Challenger Center, will partner to deliver Challenger Center’s Virtual Missions to hundreds of secondary school students on the continent. This project will help grow the population of African students who are motivated to pursue higher education and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

The FRONTIERS Science Journalism in Residency Programme has selected ten science journalists to participate in its second round of residencies. The chosen candidates —Marta Abbà, Rina Caballar, Danielle Fleming, Will Grimond, Giorgia Guglielmi, Suvi Jaakkola, Tim Kalvelage, Thomas Reintjes, Senne Starckx, and Meera Subramanian—will spend three to five months in residency at European research institutions, working on their journalistic projects.

The residencies, hosted by institutions in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, offer a unique opportunity for fellows to explore frontier research. The journalists' projects will delve into various issues shaping society with topics spanning climate change, technology, life sciences, health and medical journalism, data sharing, and space exploration.

In the eighteenth century, from opposite ends of the world, a debate raged between two scholars over a seemingly esoteric question: did Chinese history predate Judeo-Christian antiquity?

Antoine Gaubil, a French Jesuit operating a mission in Beijing, posited that it did, aligning himself with the official Chinese government chronology, and using the state’s astronomical records as his evidence. George Costard, meanwhile, a clergyman and academic working in the south of England, attempted to discredit that same astronomical history in order to disprove China’s antiquity. A new paper in Isis, “Oriental Chronology: Chinese Astronomy and the Politics of Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” articulates the political strategy animating each man’s position, and demonstrates how the study of Chinese astronomy was shaped by European political interests.