Bonnethead sharks dine on seagrass, in addition to a steady diet of marine creatures. (Credit: Jiri Prochazka/shutterstock)
Sharks are infamous meat-eaters. The ocean’s buffet of fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp and krill fill the legendary predators’ stomachs and give them sustenance. Now researchers have discovered that one particular species, bonnethead sharks, also dine on seagrass to meet their nutritional needs. The discovery means bonnethead sharks are not carnivores but omnivor ...read more
The need to digitize “dark data” — fossils and other unstudied material sitting in archives around the world — takes on new urgency in light of a devastating fire at Brazil’s Museu Nacional, or National Museum. Here, in a 2015 photo, the museum in better times. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Odair Bernardo)
As curators begin the grim work of sorting through what’s left of Brazil’s fire-ravaged National Museum, a new paper quantifies the stagg ...read more
An expanding shell of dust and gas is blown outward, away from a star’s dense, white-dwarf core in this artist’s illustration. (Credit: NASA/ESA/STSCI/G. Bacon)
Let us sympathize, for a moment, with neutrino researchers. These tireless folks devote their energies toward understanding subatomic particles that, it would appear, want nothing to do with them. Neutrinos, born from supernovas and other cosmic events, flit through the universe unaffected by almost all of it, harmlessly pa ...read more
The moss Funaria hygrometrica can absorb an impressive amount of lead thanks to a special kind of acid contained in its cell walls. (Credit: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab)
Want cleaner drinking water, free of toxins and contaminants? Mother Nature’s here to help.
A number of studies have come out over the past year looking at the role different plants could play in remediation, i.e. the removal of dangerous substances. This green technology is known as phytoremediation, from the ...read more
While in “profound rest,” bees’ antennae gradually droop down and slowly sway back and forth, a 1988 study of bees found.(Credit: C. HELFRICH-FÖRSTER / AR ENTOMOLOGY 2018 (MODIFIED FROM Walter Kaiser / Journal of Comparative Physiology A 1988))
If you watch an exhausted baby carefully, you may be able to see gravity tug heavy eyelids down. Likewise, a sleeping honeybee’s usually perky antennae droop (as illustrated here, the top row shows various views of a ho ...read more
People become less approving of social media outrage the more people join in with it. One person rebuking another is fine, but ten people doing it looks like a mob.
This is the key finding of an interesting new paper called The Paradox of Viral Outrage, from Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford.
According to the authors, the titular ‘paradox’ is that “individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by ...read more
A new preprint called “A systematic bias in DTI findings” could prove worrying for many neuroscientists. In the article, authors Farshid Sepehrband and colleagues of the University of Southern California argue that commonly-used measures of the brain’s white matter integrity may be flawed, and that this may have led to false
The technique in question, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), uses an MRI scanner to measure the diffusion of water molecules at different points in the brai ...read more
Here are our picks of the week for educators and learners (and, really, aren’t we all life-long learners?). Each project includes lesson plans aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.
Ooooooh! The school bell is about to ring. Here’s to a great year of learning and contributing to science.
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Students Discover
Students Discover offers projects about that are sure to ignite students’ interest in science. With lesson plans and hands-on activit ...read more
Here there be water! The maps show the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south (left) and north (right) poles. (Credit: NASA)
There’s water on the Moon.
Twenty years ago, evidence of frost-coated regions near the Moon’s poles was greeted with surprise and skepticism. Ten years ago, a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 space probe greatly boosted the case for water ice on the Moon. Then two weeks ago, a much deeper analysis of the Chandrayaan-1 data val ...read more
