For the last six months or so, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I have been hanging out with University of New Mexico grad student Mel Strong, watching him do science:

To the lay outsider, science can look like an edifice of fixed knowledge— the facts in textbooks.

The day-to-day business of science is different, a tangle of unanswered questions. Where, for example, does New Mexico’s summer rain come from?

Much of the work done to answer those questions is carried out by an army of Mel Strongs— bright, energetic, young grad students, the grunts of science, dashing about on rooftops catching rain.