Although it’s possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag only increases as the spacecraft gets further away.  For truly long-term, deep space missions, the significant amount of time it takes to send a signal isn’t going to cut it. The spacecraft will need to adjust its own trajectory without relying on ground navigation. That’s where ...read more

One of the many consequences of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is ocean acidification—the lowering of seawater pH as CO2 chemically reacts with dissolved ions in seawater. Scientists have found that more acidic waters are dangerous to many species, especially structure-builders like corals, and thus the potential drop in pH predicted in the future would be devastating to marine habitats. So it's not surprising that many scientists are actively looking for ways to mitigate thi ...read more

I'm a bit late to this story, but it's significant enough that I didn't want to let it pass by without posting something about it. The long and short of it is this: 2017 truly was a horrific year for weather and climate disasters, both in the United States and the world as a whole. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, fires and freezes in the United States claimed at least 362 lives and injured many more in 2017. In total, the nation experienced 16 weather and climate disaster ...read more

Attempting to contain a sneeze could be a recipe for disaster. A 34-year-old patient visited a hospital in the United Kingdom complaining of an extremely sore throat and a dramatic voice change after attempting to suppress a sneeze by pinching his nose and closing his mouth. He told doctors he felt a popping sensation in his neck and noticed immediate swelling after trying to contain the sneeze. When doctors examined him, they could hear crackling sounds—known as crepitus in medical pa ...read more

British surfers are coming back from the beach with more than good vibes. A study from University of Exeter researchers found the surfers had levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that were three times higher than those who didn't hang ten. It's likely the result of ingesting seawater laden with bacteria from sewage and run-off, they say, and it's another sign of the impending health crisis such bacteria could represent. Surf's Up! The researchers looked at just under 300 people from ...read more

People are matching their faces with famous art — and some of the results are hilarious. They’re using the Google Arts & Culture app, which uses image recognition to scour art collections from more than 1,200 museums, galleries and institutions across the world. The app has been around since 2016, but recently updated to include a selfie feature that made it take off. Tapping into the curiosity of people and the love of selfies and sharing was a smart move on Google’s ...read more

What a year it has been! We now have more than 50,000 active members participating in over 1,700 projects on SciStarter. We can't wait to see what 2018 brings. From neurons to whales and everything in between, the 2017 Top 10 Projects are as varied and diverse as their participants. Thanks for making it such a successful year for citizen science. This list, in no particular order, is based on the 10 projects with the most page views on SciStar ...read more

The first time the Saturn V launched in November of 1967, ceiling tiles in the nearby studio where Walter Cronkite was reporting from live fell to the floor. The power of the five F-1 engines was astonishing, and their combined 7.5 million pounds of thrust hasn't yet been matched. But there were more engines than just those five biggest ones. All told, it took 83 engines to get an Apollo mission to the Moon and safely back to Earth. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2c9LPNRonQ ...read more

Scientists and engineers who worked for MIT's Radiation Laboratory had a saying about World War II: The atomic bomb may have ended the war, but radar won it. A new PBS documentary makes the case for that bold statement by telling the story of Alfred Lee Loomis, a founder of the Radiation Lab and a millionaire Wall Street tycoon who directed the U.S. government's wartime effort to develop radar technologies into effective weapons. But even before ...read more

The ability to read and understand a passage of text underpins the pursuit of knowledge, and was once a uniquely human cognitive activity. But 2018 marks the year that, by one measure, machines surpassed humans’ reading comprehension abilities. Both Alibaba and Microsoft recently tested their respective artificial neural networks with The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), which is an arduous test of a machine’s natural language processing skills. It’s a dataset that ...read more