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Congress Curbs Institutional Investors’ Ownership of Single-family Homes. We Looked At this Trend
Last month, Congress overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—legislation aiming to increase the supply and affordability of housing. It includes a restriction on institutional investors’ purchases of certain single-family homes. We…
Medicare’s Hospice Bill Doubled Over the Last Decade
In recent years, Medicare’s spending on hospice has nearly doubled. We looked at this spending and found that the way Medicare pays for hospice care could be costing taxpayers billions more than it should. Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our new…
The Wins and Remaining Work for the National Alzheimer’s and Dementia Project
As many as one in three Americans dies with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. The number of diagnoses is expected to double over the next 30 years. The National Alzheimer’s Project aims to accelerate research and improve care and services…
Low Snowfall Sets Ski Resort Communities Adrift—A Federal Program Could Help
For avid skiers, low or no snowfall can mean less time on the slopes. For small businesses in ski communities, warm winters and low snowfall can signal hard financial times. When businesses are hit with weather-related disruptions, such as flooding…
Could Blind Spots in Larger Vehicles Be Putting Pedestrians and Cyclists at Greater Risk?
Thousands of pedestrians and cyclists are killed on U.S. roadways each year. Bad weather, excessive speed, and poor decisions can result in fatalities. But could the growing number of large vehicles on roads play a role as well? Commercial trucks…
Reliance on Imported Critical Minerals Leaves the U.S. Exposed. How Can Emerging Technologies Help?
From the humble AA battery to most advanced semiconductors—modern electronics depend on minerals. The U.S. has designated 60 minerals as “critical” to economic or national security. For batteries and semiconductors, which are key to our economy, the…
Perseverance’s Trip to ‘Broom Point’
Description This orbital map shows the path NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took to get to a location the science team has dubbed the “Broom Point member,” a sequence of layered bedrock likely more than 3.9 billion years old. As planned, the rover landed inside Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. It investigated the crater’s western delta…
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Provides Sweeping View of Broom Point
Description This view looking back up at the outside lip of the 490-foot-tall (150-meter-tall) rim of Jezero Crater was taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance on May 15, 2025, the 1,505th day, or sol, of the rover’s mission to Mars. The bright-colored rocks exposed across the slope, running from middle left to middle right of…
NASA’s Psyche Mission Images Details of Martian Surface During Flyby
Description Captured by the multispectral imager instrument on NASA’s Psyche mission, this is an enhanced-color mosaic created from four individual images acquired on May 15, 2026, during the spacecraft’s flyby of Mars. Psyche was traveling from right to left (northeast to southwest on Mars) during the six minutes that it took to acquire the images for…
NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica
Description Data from the Earth-orbiting U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite’s L-band radar was used to produce an image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja — a mountaintop in East Antarctica — poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The obstruction causes stresses in the ice, heavily fracturing the surrounding surfaces with…
NASA’s Juno Peers Beneath Io’s Surface
Description This map represents data captured by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft, indicating heat rising from just beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. While infrared instruments measure the temperature of the moon’s surface, the lowest frequency microwave channels (0.6 and 1.25 gigahertz) on the MWR can penetrate between about 6 and…
Mapping Io’s Hidden Heat With NASA’s Juno
Description This graphic illustrates the areas of Jupiter’s moon Io sampled by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during two close flybys. The black overlapping lines show the instrument’s footprints during Perijove 57 on Dec. 30, 2023, when the spacecraft primarily mapped the northern hemisphere. The blue lines represent Perijove 58 on…
