By Jalees Rehman, University of Illinois at Chicago

By Diogo Veríssimo, Georgia State University

It is often said that if something is repeated often enough, it becomes accepted as true. This has certainly been the case for the link between terrorism and the poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.

By Donald E. Heller, Michigan State University

Last week, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to guarantee that students could attend a community college for free for their first two years. The announcement was one in a series of previews of domestic policy proposals he is planning to include in his State of the Union speech later this month.

By Carling Hay, Harvard University

When you ask yourself what the biggest unanswered scientific questions are, “how did sea levels change over the past 100 years?” is unlikely to appear at the top of your list.

By Monica Grady, The Open University

Landing a spacecraft on a celestial body, whether it be the moon, Mars or a comet, is not easy. The European Space Agency found out the hard way in 2003 when its robot Beagle2, which was supposed to send back a signal after landing on Mars, didn’t do so.

But more than a decade after it went missing, the UK Space Agency has announced that the the elusive Beagle2 lander has been re-discovered.

By Ryan Schacht, University of Utah and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, University of California, Davis