NASA’s Operation IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown
An aerial photograph of an iceberg shaped like the Matterhorn floating in Scoresby Sund along Greenland’s eastern coast. The photo was taken during an Operation IceBridge flight on Apr. 21, 2018. (Source: NASA/Joe MacGregor)
During my very first visit to the Arctic, the Sun did a lazy 360 above Tromsø, Norway each day. It was summer, and I was simply entranced by the midnight ...read more
Curvature map of a Homo naledi cranial endocast. (Credit PNAS)
Maybe size doesn’t matter that much after all.
Ever since its discovery in 2013, Homo naledi — the newest addition to our family tree — has been a source of speculation and surprise. The South African hominin’s latest mind-bending revelation: Its brain, though notably small, had several structural details similar to those of bigger-brained members of the genus Homo, including us. The new research hi ...read more
Matt Madd
It’s time to focus on what keeps you healthy! We’ve curated a list of citizen science projects working to promote health and wellness around the world. Whether you’re looking at the microbes inside of your gut or tracking your latest run, we’ve got you covered!
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Cochrane Crowd
Contribute to better healthcare decisions by categorizing research records! Become a Cochrane citizen scientist and work together with collaborators all over t ...read more
Hubble also saw water vapor erupting from Europa, shown here in an artist illustration with real images but enhanced ejecta. (Credit: NASA/ESA/and M. Kornmesser)
Score another point for Jupiter’s moon Europa as a top target in the hunt for alien life. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists say they’ve found the best evidence yet that plumes of water erupt from an ocean hidden beneath the moon’s icy shell.
The Hubble Space Telescope h ...read more
A’a lava flows from Fissure 17 on Kilauea, seen on May 13, 2018. USGS/HVO.
After a brief respite, the fissure eruptions on the lower East Rift zone of Kilauea ramped back up again over the weekend, this time to the northeast of Leilani Estates. Fissure 17 (formerly fissure 18) has been erupting vigorously over the past day and has now produced lava fountains that have throw lava bombs hundreds of meters up — watch the USGS video below for some stunning shots of lava blasting out of t ...read more
A new study shows that record-breaking ocean heat pumped up Hurricane Harvey, contributing to catastrophic flooding
An animation of infrared imagery from the GOES-16 weather satellite shows the evolution of Hurricane Harvey between Aug. 25 and 28 2017. (Note: The animation may take awhile to fully load and play smoothly. Source: RAMMB/CIRA)
The North Atlantic hurricane season last year was extraordinary for a number reasons, but none more memorable than these:
Irma, Maria a ...read more
Cichlidogyrus attenboroughi. (Credit: Nikol Kmentová)
Let’s talk about soul mates.
It’s a nice concept, but functionally unworkable. There are just too many people out there for any one person you meet to be “the one”. In reality, it’s probably more like “one of roughly several million people, some marginally better than others”. And if we take the thought experiment at face value and assume that there were truly just one soul mate for each of u ...read more
I remember passing notes in grade school. Oh, the thrill of exchanging “secret” messages with friends. In reality, teachers and classmates saw it happening and were probably super annoyed. Not to mention the repercussions if the message were intercepted.
But now, there’s a better way to keep your messages secret. A group of computer scientists from Columbia University created FontCode — a way to unobtrusively hide secret messages in the very shapes of printed letters the ...read more
A new paper in ACS Chemical Neuroscience pulls no punches in claiming that most of what we know about the neuroscience of learning is wrong: Dendritic Learning as a Paradigm Shift in Brain Learning
According to authors Shira Sardi and colleagues, the prevailing view which is that learning takes place in the synapses is mistaken. Instead, they say, ‘dendritic learning’ is how brain cells really store information.
If a neuron is a tree, the dendrites are the branches, while the synaps ...read more
An international team of astronomers was able to determine the chemical composition of Kuiper Belt Object 2004 EW95, an asteroid 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) away from Earth. Its makeup revealed elements that are prominent in the inner solar system, suggesting a significant outward migration. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
It’s believed that our solar system’s gas giants caused quite a ruckus in their infancies. As they exited their tight orbits and began outward migr ...read more
