Danny Perez CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 From June 18 to June 24 we celebrate the pollinators that make most of our food possible. This week, take a moment to make and share your observations with scientists. Our editors selected five projects in need of your help. More about pollinators from Penn State’s website: “Pollinators include bees, butterflies, beetles, flies, some birds and some bats. They move pollen from male structures (anthers) of flowers to t ...read more

A traditional Amazonian psychedelic brew is an effective and rapid-acting antidepressant, according to a paper just published. But the new study revives some long-standing questions. Ayahuasca is a mixture of herbs, traditionally used for spiritual and therapeutic purposes. The main active ingredients are N,N-DMT, a potent psychedelic, and several molecules that inhibit the enzyme MAO. The MAO inhibitors serve to prevent the N,N-DMT from being broken down by the digestive system, allowing it to ...read more

Here is how sea surface temperatures differed from the the 1981-2010 average during May of 2018. (Source: ENSO Blog/Climate.gov) While 2019 is still a long way off, we’ve now got some strong hints that the coming year could bring even warmer global temperatures, plus droughts in some regions, and floods in others. These climatic and weather effects would come from an El Niño that seems to be gestating in the tropical Pacific. A warming of tropical Pacific ...read more

By Caroline Nickerson Over the past few months, members of the SciStarter team have been working around the country to share new citizen science projects at science festivals. It’s been so much fun to join others excited about science and get a chance to meet some of you! Organizing a science festival is a labor of love, fueled by the passion of the coordinators, exhibitors, and participants. The Cambridge Science Festival was one of the first of its kind in the United S ...read more

A composite image of over 500 U.S. Christian’s perceptions of what God looks like. (Credit: Joshua Jackson Et Al) What would you say if you saw this stranger on a bus? Well, if you’re Christian, you might say he’s God. Psychologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surveyed 511 Christians in the U.S. and, based on the participants’ combined perceptions, this is roughly what they thought Go ...read more

An urban fox scavenges on the edge of a park. (Credit: Shutterstock) For their first 100 million years on planet Earth, our mammal ancestors relied on the cover of darkness to escape their dinosaur predators and competitors. Only after the meteor-induced mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago could these nocturnal mammals explore the many wondrous opportunities available in the light of day. Fast forward to the present, and the honeymoon in the sun may be over for mammals. Theyâ ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) It seems impossible, right? We have been taught from the time we were young that babies are made when a sperm and an egg come together, and the DNA from these two cells combine to make a unique individual with half the DNA from the mother and half from the father. So how can there be a third person involved in this process? To understand the idea of three-parent babies, we have to talk about DNA. Most people are familiar with the double helix-style DNA which make up the 2 ...read more

Yesterday, we started the 2018 Geology World Cup with voting for Group A, so let’s move to the next group! Group B Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Wikimedia Commons. Morocco: Much of Morocco’s geology is linked with the slow collision of Africa and Europe. The Atlas Mountains rise up on the western side of Africa and represent the the stresses put on the two plates by Africa plowing into Europe over the last 65 million years. The mountain range that pre-da ...read more

Artist’s conception of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a supermassive black hole tears apart a star and launches a relativistic jet. The background image is a Hubble Space Telescope image of Arp 299, the colliding galaxies where the TDE from this study was found. (Credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, STScI) Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t goin ...read more