Earth's interior is dark, but filled with diamonds. A study published Monday estimates the composition of deep rock layers known as cratons and concludes that they may be far more glittery than previously suspected. Parts of Earth's mantle may be up to two percent diamond by composition, far more than previously suspected. In terms of sheer mass, that works out to around a quadrillion, or thousand trillion, tons of diamond. Sparkly Science A team led by a researcher from the Univers ...read more

Last week, on Monday, July 9, Darlene Cavalier, the founder of SciStarter and Science Cheerleader and a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, presented on a panel at a American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) event. The panel was part of a larger two-day conference hosted by ASEE for engineering communicators. The panel was moderated by Pamela Phetphongsy, Assistant Dean for Communications at the Cla ...read more

Five “Jawsâ€�-dropping projects for Shark Week   As a prelude to the Discovery Channel’s 30th year of Shark Week, SciStarter’s editors picked these five projects you can do related to sharks and their conservation. Whether it’s collecting and reporting shark egg cases or documenting sightings to track species, there are many ways to unlock your inner elasmobranchologistÂ&nb ...read more

Agriculture is thought to have been developed 11,000 years ago in the Levant, where Iraq, Israel and Jordan are today. But in recent years, archaeologists have discovered sites in the region suggesting hunter-gatherers were making use of crops thousands of years earlier. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers reveals that foragers in northeastern Jordan were baking bread from wild cereals more than 14 millennia ago. C ...read more

Astronomers can sometimes be literal to a fault. We like to call things as we see them. For example, if it’s red and it’s huge: “Red Giant.� White and small: “White Dwarf.� Massive explosion: “Big Bang.� Dark and sucks everything in: “Black Hole.� Most of the time, classifying objects this way works fine& ...read more

A paper just published reports that Republicans are more likely to have used the adultery website Ashley Madison than Democrats, while Libertarians were even more likely to do so. That's a claim that could ruffle some feathers, but the way in which the researchers conducted this study might be even more controversial. That's because this paper is based on the 2015 Ashley Madison data leak, which exposed the personal data, including names and credit-card details, of millions of registered ...read more

It has been an unpleasant few weeks here in Colorado. Brutal heat and air pollution have made many of my daily runs along trails like the one above challenging — to put it mildly. Recurrent poor air quality has taken a particular toll. Smoke from eight major wildfires burning in Colorado — more than anywhere else in the contiguous United States right now — has mixedÂ&nbs ...read more

We've made it! The 2018 Geology World Cup Finals are here. One of the semifinal matches was really a squeaker while the other featured a blowout. Final Match: Perú vs. Iceland You'd have to say, Perú was a dark horse in this tournament. This is not to say the country doesn't have spectacular geology, but they took out Russia, Colombia and Croatia to reach the finals. Perú is known for its volcanoes, including the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina, one of th ...read more

Though it’s been gone for nearly a year, the Cassini spacecraft continues to fuel new studies of Saturn and its many moons. In particular, Cassini’s unique and close-up view of the system during its Grand Finale orbits produced data that have revealed how plasma waves moving outward from the planet interact with both its rings and its moons. Research based on evaluation of the data was published April 26 and June 7 in Geophysical Research Letters. Now, in ...read more

On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing�); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery ...read more