With NASA’s Juno spacecraft, scientists have gotten a good look at the top and bottom of the planet for the first time. What they found astounded them: bizarre geometric arrangements of storms, each arrayed around one cyclone over the north and south poles–unlike any storm formation seen in the universe.

A team led by Prof. Angela Olinto was awarded NASA funding to fly an ultra-long duration balloon mission with an innovative ultra-sensitive telescope to pick up cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from deep space.

The U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the Virgo detector in Italy announced on Oct. 16 that all three of their detectors had picked up the ripples, or gravitational waves, from two neutron stars that collided 130 million years ago. Among other discoveries, the detection allowed scientists to use gravitational waves to directly calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “for his contributions to behavioural economics,” a relatively new field that bridges the gap between economics and psychology.

Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays–whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way. The answer is a galaxy or galaxies far, far away, according to a report published Sept. 22 in Science by the Pierre Auger Collaboration.