In January 2017, eleven field science advocates gathered in an unlikely location: indoors. These individuals were educators, scientists, and web platform developers participating in the Designing Citizen Science for Both Science and Education workshop, hosted by the Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The workshop focused on georeferenced field studies, which are projects that involve the collection of data organized by location.
Led by ...read more
Brain surgery is not usually something that people actively seek out. However, there may be an exception: the idea of the removal of the amygdala seems to hold a fascination for many people.
Questions about the desirability of an amygdala-free life can be found in many places online. On Quora, there have been many queries about what amygdala removal would entail, and at least one brave user outright asked Can I have my amygdala removed? I came across the question on two other sites within the pa ...read more
(Credit: By Angela Rohde/Shutterstock)
If we humans want to slow down global warming due to carbon emissions, clean energy is the way. But, as with all things, there are cons to go along with those pros. New research reports that installing large-scale wind farms across the country could raise the temperature of the continental United States.
The study, published in the journal Joule, is based on mathematical modeling done by experts at Harvard University. First, the team created a climat ...read more
An artist’s conception of what an orbital lunar station could look like. (Credit: NASA)
It looks like the moon is back in style. Decades after NASA’s last trip to our satellite, both Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin have recently announced plans for lunar landers, and NASA hopes to build a Lunar Orbital-Platform Gateway that would sit in orbit around the moon.
The moon is a logical stepping stone for longer missions to Mars and beyond, and it offers a crucial testing ground for ...read more
Hayabusa2 watches the MASCOT lander descend to the surface of asteroid Ryugu. (Credit: JAXA, Tokyo University, Kochi Univ., Rikkyo Univ., Nagoya Univ., Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji Univ., Aizu Univ., AIST)
In yet another historic feat, Hayabusa2’s MASCOT rover has completed its mission to explore, probe and photograph the surface of asteroid Ryugu. The rover spent three asteroid-days, or 17 Earth-hours, hopping across the asteroid and conducting research with an array of high-pow ...read more
A technician scans for radiation with a Geiger counter. (Credit: PRESSLAB/Shutterstock)
For decades, studies have shown that even low doses of radiation are harmful to humans.
This week, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration may be reconsidering that. The Environmental Protection Agency seemed to be looking at raising the levels of radiation considered dangerous to humans based on a controversial theory rejected by mainstream scientists. ...read more
A burial at Sungir covered in beads. (Credit: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez/Wikimedia Commons)
Some 34,000 years ago, two boys and a middle-aged man were buried in fantastic style. They were laid to rest wearing over 13,000 mammoth ivory beads, hundreds of perforated fox canine teeth and other adornments. Discovered in the 1960s, at the site of Sungir, Russia, the burials also contained spears, figurines and the hollowed out shaft of a woman’s femur, packed with red ochre. Arc ...read more
There are a number of theories about how life began on Earth, but one new study published October 3 in the journal ACS Nano suggests that the building blocks of life could have been created with liquid crystals.
Liquid crystals have properties of both conventional liquids and solids — they flow like a liquid, but their molecular structure is ordered and symmetric like a solid crystal. You’re likely familiar with them already — liquid crystal display (LCD) screens are used in ...read more
Before it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn on its final death dive, the Cassini spacecraft made 22 orbits of the planet that followed a path no probe had taken before: It flew between the massive planet and its rings. During those final orbits, Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) spotted water ice and complex organic molecules flowing from the rings to the atmosphere of the planet: ring rain. But it turns out, “ring rain is more like a ring downpour,” accord ...read more
Over its nearly 20 year mission, NASA's Cassini spacecraft redefined our understanding of Saturn. And while Cassini sent its final transmissions to Earth as it dove into the ringed planet last September, scientists have just published more than half a dozen papers using data collected during its "Grand Finale." The studies, published in both Science and the Geophysical Research Letters help refine our knowledge of the planet and its rings and how they evolved.
Planetary scientist Hunter ...read more
