This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributors draw on their years of experience in the field to identify the unique ethical and logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 and offer suggestions for how to adjust and continue research in the face of the pandemic’s disruptions. Key themes include how contingency planning must now be a central part of our research designs; how cyberspace has increasingly become “the field” for the time being; and how scholars can build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with “field citizens,” now and in the future.

We summarize work on the central parsec of the Galactic center based on imaging and spectroscopic observations at the Keck and Gemini telescopes. These observations include stellar positions in two dimension and the velocity in three dimensions. Spectroscopic observations also enables measurements of the physical properties of individual stars, such as the spectral type and in some cases the effective temperature, metallicity, and surface gravity. These observations show a complex stellar population with a young (4-6 Myr) compact star cluster in the central 0.5 pc embedded in in an older and much more massive nuclear star cluster. Surprisingly, the old late-type giants do not show a cusp profile as long been expected from theoretical work. The majority of the stars have higher than solar metallicity, with only about 6% of the stars having [M/Fe] < −0.5, which is consistent with an origin from the MW disk.

The diagnosis of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis in a medical officer working in a metropolitan Australian neonatal intensive care unit led to a contact investigation involving 125 neonates, 165 relatives, and 122 healthcare workers with varying degrees of exposure. There was no evidence of nosocomial tuberculosis transmission from the index case.

The science of extra-solar planets is one of the most rapidly changing areas of astrophysics and since 1995 the number of planets known has increased by almost two orders of magnitude. A combination of ground-based surveys and dedicated space missions has resulted in 560-plus planets being detected, and over 1200 that await confirmation. NASA's Kepler mission has opened up the possibility of discovering Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around some of the 100,000 stars it is surveying during its 3 to 4-year lifetime. The new ESA's Gaia mission is expected to discover thousands of new planets around stars within 200 parsecs of the Sun. The key challenge now is moving on from discovery, important though that remains, to characterisation: what are these planets actually like, and why are they as they are?

In the past ten years, we have learned how to obtain the first spectra of exoplanets using transit transmission and emission spectroscopy. With the high stability of Spitzer, Hubble, and large ground-based telescopes the spectra of bright close-in massive planets can be obtained and species like water vapour, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide have been detected. With transit science came the first tangible remote sensing of these planetary bodies and so one can start to extrapolate from what has been learnt from Solar System probes to what one might plan to learn about their faraway siblings. As we learn more about the atmospheres, surfaces and near-surfaces of these remote bodies, we will begin to build up a clearer picture of their construction, history and suitability for life.

The Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory, EChO, will be the first dedicated mission to investigate the physics and chemistry of Exoplanetary Atmospheres. By characterising spectroscopically more bodies in different environments we will take detailed planetology out of the Solar System and into the Galaxy as a whole.

EChO has now been selected by the European Space Agency to be assessed as one of four M3 mission candidates.

For snakes, prey size and sex are two possible determinants of head and body size. In garter snakes Thamnophis sirtalis, females are generally longer and have greater body weights than males, and also have larger relative head sizes, which may facilitate foraging success. The selective pressures that account for sexual size dimorphism in garter snakes have not been unequivocally demonstrated. In this study, the body (length and mass) and head (head length, head width, jaw length, inter-ocular distance) sizes of garter snakes inhabiting two nearby but ecologically dissimilar sites with different types of available prey were compared. Overall, the adult female snakes were larger and had greater relative head sizes than males. Males from the two sites did not differ significantly in body or head sizes. However, the mean body length and mass of females from a site where vertebrates are included in the diet were greater than that of females feeding almost exclusively on earthworms. There were also significant site differences in all four head measurements in females, although the direction of the difference varied by site. Diet-induced morphological plasticity is well documented and was evident in this study, although the relative roles of genotype, ontogeny, and competing selective forces in the expression of such plasticity can only be ascertained through future experimental studies.

Biorobots may model the causation of relatively simple behaviors, but many animal behaviorists are concerned with complex cognitive traits and their evolution. Biorobotics seems limited in its ability to model cognition and to provide evolutionary explanations. Also, if robots could model complex traits, such as theory of mind, underdetermination could be problematic. Underdetermination is also a challenge for comparative psychologists.