Editor’s Note: You got to know Dan with his team member spotlight. Now you can read about his perspective on and work with libraries!
By Dan Stanton
If you haven’t visited your local public library in a while or if you just pop in from time to time, I highly recommend you take some time to look around and really take in what is going on:
Take a walk around the building: you are likely to see a maker space, a seed library, or a teen area hosting a coding club (&ldquo ...read more
This artist’s concept shows Pioneer venturing out into interstellar space. Both Pioneer 10 and 11 carry a plaque bearing a message from Earth. (Credit: NASA)
The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft famously contain messages to anyone who might someday find them. Both Pioneers carry a plaque, while the Voyagers carry a phonograph record. An enormous amount of effort went into creating these objects, but could an alien observer truly understand the messages we have sent to the stars?
While we c ...read more
(Credit: Willyam Bradberry/Shutterstock)
Like it or not, we’re surrounded by robots. Thousands of Americans ride to work these days in cars that pretty much drive themselves. Vacuum cleaners scoot around our living rooms on their own. Quadcopter drones automatically zip over farm fields, taking aerial surveys that help farmers grow their crops. Even scary-looking humanoid robots, ones that can jump and run like us, may be commercially available in the near future.
Robotic devices are ge ...read more
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft captured this animation of a solar prominence on August 13, 2018. (Source: NASA)
In my ongoing hunt for cool imagery to feature here at ImaGeo, I regularly check to see what NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft has been seeing on the Sun. The animation above is one of SDO’s more recent captures.
It shows an eruption of material rising up along invisible magnetic field lines, twisting, and then falling back down, a ...read more
SciStarter and Arizona State University are happy to announce that we’ve received support from the National Science Foundation to host a workshop at North Caroline State University, November 8-9, 2018.
This workshop is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening acces ...read more
Amos Barkai discovered this now classic example of predator-prey reversal 30 years ago. Photo Credit: Paul Hanekom (used with permission from Amos Barkai)
The year was 1983. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi had just hit theaters, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” topped the charts, and Amos Barkai was a new graduate student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He’d recently gotten his bachelor’s from Tel Aviv University, and was excite ...read more
[Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. Enjoy!]
Here is yet another jewel from one of the ...read more
A preprint recently posted on bioRxiv has garnered a lot of attention – mainly because of its title. The article, from Jan Willem Koten Jr et al., is called Occurrence of non-western magic in the European brain, an intriguing although not very informative title for a scientific paper.
The intrigue deepens once we read the paper and find references to the famous ‘voodoo correlations’ and also a new species of neuro-monster: ‘zombie oscillations’, which the authors cl ...read more
(Credit: Oteera/shutterstock)
Give up smoking for cheesecake? Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
People who quit smoking cigarettes often gain weight. That’s not necessarily because ex-smokers need a new habit and they enjoy eating. It’s because the nicotine in cigarettes suppresses appetite to some degree. When the nicotine stops, appetite returns and people can put on pounds.
The correlation between quitting smoking and weight gain has been observed in many studies. And ...read more
Students in India surfing the web. Many in the country still lack internet access. (Credit: CRS PHOTO)
Despite the name, the World Wide Web … isn’t. Some 52 percent of the world — roughly 4 billion people, mostly women — don’t have access to the open web.
This has sparked something like a new space race, featuring satellites, high altitude balloons, drones, even lasers. The rush of startups and tech companies — including SpaceX, Google, Facebook — mak ...read more
