At the University of Iowa, you can see how gravity works by playing in the sand. Undergraduate students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy designed and built a sandbox where users can mold their own universe with sand and watch how gravity affects an object—a spacecraft or a comet, for example—as it travels through the…

For two weeks last fall, Ingrid Ukstins lived life on the wild and dangerous side. The University of Iowa volcanologist spent her days collecting samples from a volcano on Tanna, an island in the remote South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu. The volcano, called Yasur, spews out flaming masses or “bombs”—some the size of a small car. So, Ukstins trained…