The explosion of digital data is behind the boom in careers based on statistics, including actuarial science, informatics, and machine learning, Altman notes. “These fields have all been very highly ranked for a number of years now,” she explains. “Data are a huge resource, but statisticians are needed to help people make sense of the information gathered.

A team of astronomers from Penn State and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland has discovered a new planet that is closely orbiting a red-giant star, HD 102272, which is much more evolved than our own Sun. The planet has a mass that is nearly six times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The team includes Alexander Wolszczan, the discoverer of the first planets ever found outside our solar system, who is an Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics and the director of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State; and Andrzej Niedzielski, who leads his collaborators in Poland. The team suspects that a second planet may be orbiting HD 102272, as well. The findings, which will be published in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal, shed light on the ways in which aging stars can influence nearby planets.