Why don’t kids like math and science? Based on my many years of teaching elementary math and science, I know that when kids are bored with these subjects, it’s usually because they don’t see the point of how these subjects could be useful or interesting in the context of their real lives. Kids want to apply their math and science skills to make things happen! One great way to help them do this and see the value of these subjects is to introduce the idea of citizen science. Cit ...read more

In Nebraska, scientists working for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission are increasingly relying on casual researchers and citizen scientists to better understand three creatures in particular: spotted skunks, salamanders, and regal fritillary and monarch butterflies. Why? The populations of these species have either declined or are in jeopardy, and scientists want to get a current population count. Let's take a closer look at these three Nebraskan citizen science projects and what researcher ...read more

If you enjoy watching videos on the internet, you've likely already witnessed the phenomenon known as supercooling. Basically, the process involves taking ultra-pure water and putting it into a clean, smooth container that lacks any structural defects. If the conditions are right, when you attempt to freeze the water by dropping its temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius), it will surprisingly remain in a liquid state. This is because in order for ice crystals ...read more

Southern California is famous for its sandy beaches, wine country, theme parks and Hollywood glitz. And also its earthquakes. Now, researchers have identified more than 1.8 million previously unknown earthquakes that hit Southern California between 2008 and 2017. The findings suggest these truly tiny earthquakes — as small as just 0.3 magnitude on the Richter scale — happen every 174 seconds, yet they're hardly felt on Earth's surface. “The goal was to prod ...read more

Oh, to be a synesthete, those rare people with access to an extra layer of perception. Sounds have colors. Words have taste. Colors play music. The list goes on. The phenomenon isn't totally understood by scientists, but the general idea is that those with synesthesia experience sensory inputs differently than the rest of us. It's no wonder that synesthesia is common among artists. But for those of us that just see letters as letters and can't taste a song ...read more

On August 13, 2017, the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescope spotted an intense solar flare from a tiny star barely bigger than Jupiter. But despite this sun's diminutive size, the flare gave off as much energy as 80 billion megatons of TNT. That's 10 times as powerful as the strongest flare ever observed on our own sun. It’s also the coolest star ever observed to give off such a hot flare, and the spectacular outburst is teaching astronomers the power of small stars. Light it U ...read more

As alarm grew over autism prevalence at the turn of this century, there was much public talk of a growing “epidemic.” That language has since softened, and it is now clear that many autistic people were there all along, their condition unrecognized until relatively recently. But what is the cause? The emerging narrative today is that there is no single cause — rather, multiple factors, roughly sorted into the categories of genetics and environment, work together in complex way ...read more

Don’t you just hate it when a moth larva busts in through the wall of your house like some squirmy lepidopteran Kool-Aid man? If you’re a colony of aphids living in a gall, this is a real threat. But luckily there’s a team of heroes ready to spring to action, even sacrifice themselves, to repair that wall and save the rest of the clan. A team of Japanese researchers has been studying this phenomenon for over 15 years. Their latest work, out this week in PNAS, breaks down the i ...read more

Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what's now Kenya and you've got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The enormous bitey mammal was identified only after researchers rediscovered partial fossils of it, forgotten in the backroom of a museum. To be clear, Simbakubwa is neither a bear nor a member of the extended feline family, even though its name is Swahili for "big lion." Instead, the mas ...read more

Our solar system is a whopping 4.5 billion years old. And those earliest days were some of the most interesting for astronomers. That's when the planets formed, building from dust grains into the whole worlds that now populate our space neighborhood. But most of this material has been drastically changed since its early days – incorporated into planets, or baked by the sun and weathered by time. However, if we could find material that hasn’t been ch ...read more