Maura Boldrini, a Columbia University neurobiologist and author of a new study that found evidence of new neurons and their stem cell progenitors in brains as old as 79, describes the work, and why we’re still resolving questions about aging brains.

Sean Solomon, a planetary scientist at Columbia University who was one of the leading scientists behind Messenger, is confident that its successor will bring back as many questions as answers, thanks to its new instruments and flight plan.

“The exciting part is that the neurons are there throughout a lifetime,” said Maura Boldrini from Columbia University in New York and first author of the new study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Hundreds of black holes may lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, according to a new Columbia study. Such a tight swirl of black holes, which had been theorized for decades but never detected, bolsters current models of how galaxies evolve.

For decades, scientists have thought that black holes should sink to the center of galaxies and accumulate there, says Chuck Hailey, an astrophysicist at Columbia University. But scientists had no proof that these exotic objects had actually gathered together in the center of the Milky Way.

Jeremiah Ostriker, a Columbia University astrophysicist, said this atypical galaxy might have been formed by the collision between two typical galaxies, leaving a region of space without dark matter but with gas that eventually turned into stars.

Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory biological oceanographer Joaquim Goes captured a photograph of a large phytoplankton bloom in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Muscat, Oman, on February 12.