Dig into this serving of Thanksgiving projects with friends and family. This Thanksgiving, we are thankful for you, our outstanding community of citizen scientists and researchers. Thank you for your efforts, big and small. Happy Thanksgiving. Now, feast on these projects! Cheers! The SciStarter Team This project is for our New England friends. Record sightings of female turkeys and their young to help biologists learn about the impacts of winter storms on turkeys in New Hampshire. Location: ...read more

(Left) Picture of the laboratory drop tower. (Right) The expansion of granular clusters from impact. (Credit: Hiroaki Katsuragi and Jürgen Blum) By firing plastic, lead and glass projectiles into clumps of dust, researchers are improving our understanding of how planets form in the universe. Planets start out as loose clumps of dust grains. And, like flour clumps up as you mix it into cake batter, cosmic dust clumps eventually build up to become planets like Earth as gravity pul ...read more

A patient performs a video search. (Credit: Nuyujukian P, et al. PLoS ONE 13 (11): e0204566.) For the first time, three tetraplegic people are able to control a commercial tablet device with their thoughts thanks to a brain-computer interface. The research suggests that people who lose the capacity to speak may be able continue to communicate with the technology. Mind-controlled Mouse The three study participants are part of a clinical trial to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) called Brai ...read more

(Credit: Suriya Yapin/Shutterstock) From dogs to giraffes, humans aren’t the only ones who know the glorious relief that comes from scratching an itch. But the science around itchiness is still kind of hazy. Especially when it stems from skin diseases like psoriasis or eczema, which each affect more than 3 million people in the U.S. yearly. To try and get experts on the same page, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine’s aptly named Center for the Study of ...read more

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Peasants revel at a wedding feast in this classic 1567 work by Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Food has long been linked to celebration across many cultures. This holiday season, you’ll be tasting a lot more than you think thanks to the complex role of taste receptors in the digestive process. (Credit: Peter Brugel/Wikimedia Commons) Every November, millions of Americans tuck into a tasty Thanksgiving dinner, most often a traditional roast turkey with all the trimmin ...read more

A screenshot from a Nature video showing the ionic wind drone. (Credit: Nature) Most drones today are noisy: The whine of motors and the hum of propellers produces an unavoidable din that instantly telegraphs their presence. By contrast, the small plane that flew across an indoor track on the MIT campus this fall was eerily silent. Though its furthest flights were obviously powered, you could be forgiven for thinking it was some sort of trick. That’s because the plane uses an entirely no ...read more

Archeologists say that Levallois style tools represent a significant progression in tool technology. New research explains how this technique emerged in East Asia. (Credit: Bo Li) To the untrained eye, stone tools look a lot like old rocks. But to an archeologist, stone tool surfaces provide important clues about the technological advancements of their crafters. The history of stone tool making dates back to 3 million years ago. As our ancient predecessors evolved, their tools changed, too. An ...read more