What color are these shells? The grove snail, Cepaea nemoralis, comes in a range of colors that can be roughly sorted into three groups: yellow, pink and brown. Tracking color has been key to studying the evolution of this snail, however new research published in the journal Heredity highlights differences in the way humans see color that can make categorization a bit trickier (remember The Dress?) “As scientists, to ensure the accuracy of our studies and the subsequent interpretat ...read more

Getting enough deep sleep might be the key to preventing dementia. In a series of recent experiments on mice, researchers discovered that deep sleep helps the brain clear out potentially toxic waste. The discovery reinforces how critical quality sleep is for brain health and suggests sleep therapies might curb the advance of memory-robbing ailments, like Alzheimer's disease. “Alzheimer’s disease is a major problem for the patients, their families and society,” said M ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well. Scientists exploring the physics of peeling tape have observed that tape detaches from a surface in a series of tiny lines perpendicular to the peeling direction that can tr ...read more

Troels Schönfeldt can trace his path to becoming a nuclear energy entrepreneur back to 2009, when he and other young physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen started getting together for an occasional “beer and nuclear” meetup. The beer was an India pale ale that they brewed themselves in an old, junk-filled lab space in the institute’s basement. The “nuclear” part was usually a bull session about their options for fighting two of humanity’s ...read more

If you find yourself getting used to strangely scorching or abnormally frigid temperatures, you might not be alone. After combing through over two billion tweets about the weather, a team of researchers found that people seem to get used to abnormal weather pretty quickly. They found that users were less likely to post about unusually high or low temperatures if the same weather conditions had been seen in the past few years.  Peoples’ idea of “normal” weat ...read more

Stratocumulus clouds spread out like puffy cotton balls in orderly rows above the ocean in the sub-tropics. The low-hovering clouds provide the planet shade and help keep Earth cool. But in a new study published this week, researchers say that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could wipe out these clouds. The discovery means that, under “business as usual” emissions scenarios, Earth could heat up 14 degrees Fahrenheit within a century. “We are perturbing a complex ...read more

Bears with diets that are based largely on human food are hibernating less, which is causing them to age quicker biologically, according to a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports. A research team tracked 30 black bears near Durango, Colo., between 2011 and 2015, paying close attention to their eating and hibernation habits. The researchers found that bears who foraged on human food hibernated less during the winters — sometimes, by as much as 50 days — than bea ...read more

In early 2018, Scistarter and Arizona State University began the process of collaborating with a local community, Boulder Ridge, to measure the quality of its air. Boulder Ridge is a 55 and older retirement community in Phoenix. Over the past three years, Boulder Ridge residents began to notice increased blasting, crushing, and trucking out of rock and dirt from an open stone mine next door operated by Southwest Rock Products, LLC. On days when there were no blasts or trucks, the residents ...read more

What a bee! Lost to the science since 1981, the world’s largest bee (Megachile pluto) has been rediscovered on an island in Indonesia. Its non-scientific name is Wallace’s giant bee, named for British entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection … and giant it is! With a 2.5 inch wingspan, this beast of a bee towers over its more familiar brethren. The female is pictured here — males of the species are smaller, someth ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Lemons are known for their face-puckering sour taste. Now scientists have uncovered the mysterious genes behind this acidity, new findings that could help farmers breed sweeter oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit and other citrus fruit. The oldest known reference to citruses dates back to roughly 2200 B.C., when tributes of mandarins and pomelos wrapped in ornamental silks were presented to the imperial court of Yu the Great in China. More citruses are now ...read more