Black Panther is making headlines as a box office hit that's also a superhero movie starring black actors. But it could also be the biggest science movie of the year.

Congress averted a second government shutdown by passing a bipartisan budget deal that raised spending caps for the next two years, but didn’t specify how the money should be spent. That came a few days later when President Trump released his budget proposal for 2019.

MIT is the latest in a string of prestigious universities to reveal ties to slavery that go back to the founding of the institution. The information comes from an undergraduate research course called “MIT and Slavery.”

A news organization called Climate Home News this week obtained, and then published, a draft of a UN climate science report. The report assesses the feasibility and likely benefits of achieving the most ambitious goal set by the Paris climate agreement – which is to hold total global average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The conclusion is that it will be difficult to cut emissions quickly enough.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch has ignited hopes of sending humans back to the moon, and on to Mars. But what about that cherry-red Tesla left floating through space?

A workshop in Woods Hole on February 1st brought together an unusual combination of scientists, engineers, fishermen, and government regulators to talk about an even more unusual idea: catching lobsters with no rope connecting the traps at the bottom with a buoy at the surface.

Forensics laboratories have featured in hit TV shows and attained a level of mainstream familiarity and fame that few other sciences can claim. But a new investigation, which appears as the cover story of the February 26 edition of The Nation , finds that much of forensics may not be scientific at all.

It’s no secret that Massachusetts has an affordable housing problem. In his 2018 State of the Commonwealth address, Governor Charlie Baker noted that “it has been decades since this state produced enough housing to keep up with demand.”

Heidi Ledford, a senior biology and medicine reporter for the journal Nature , catches us up on major science headlines of the past month:

The US Department of Agriculture is predicting record meat production and consumption in 2018, but it’s a changed picture from a generation ago. It turns out, per-capita beef production and consumption in America peaked in the mid-1970s.