Front Matter

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• Opinion: Telepresence is a potentially transformative tool for field science
  The broader adoption of telepresence technologies could have a dramatic effect on science research and data collection, fundamentally changing the way scientists study natural systems. Image courtesy of Alex DeCiccio (Inner Space Center, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI).

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• Science and Culture: Musicians join scientists to explore data through sound
  Researchers are sonifying proteins by assigning a chord to each amino acid, even sonifying climate data by increasing pitch with temperature. Image courtesy of Kevin G. Yager (Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY).

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• Inner Workings: Icy ocean worlds offer chances to find life
  Searching for signs of life beyond Earth, researchers are increasingly looking to the oceans on distant moons. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

PNAS in the News

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• Deep microbial life in subduction zone
  A chemical analysis of organic matter encapsulated in rocks from a serpentine mud volcano above the Izu-Bonin-Mariana subduction zone in the Pacific Ocean indicates that microbial life deep within or below the mud volcano may have produced the organic matter.
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• Epiphany learning model
  In an experiment with undergraduates who played multiple rounds of a game in which two players each choose a number with the goal of being closest to 90% of the average of the two chosen numbers, most players who adopted the optimal strategy of always choosing zero did so in a sudden rather than gradual fashion, while exhibiting eye movement and pupil dilation patterns consistent with the authors’ model of epiphany learning.
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• Ice age art and ornamentation in Wallacea
  Researchers report evidence of ancient human symbolic culture in the Wallacea zone of eastern Indonesia.
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