Wynn, James. Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement. The University of Alabama Press, 2017. 224 pages. Paperback $US 24.95. Citizen scientists have repeatedly faced resistance from skeptics questioning their experience, training, and ability, but recent technological advances have brought citizen science into the digital age, transforming many aspects of the process. This ranges from the experience of being involved in a project as a citizen scientis ...read more

One-third of GE's Catalyst engine, a turboprop set to fly in the Cessna Denali, is 3D printed. It has the most 3D-printed parts of any plane engine in the world. (Credit: GE Aviation) In 2014, eight engineers started a secret project behind the walls of GE Aviation’s headquarters. Their challenge? Build an aircraft engine with 3D printing instead of traditional manufacturing. The engineers wanted to make an engine with fewer parts than normal – way fewer parts. The normal CT7 t ...read more

India could be the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface (Credit: ISRO) India’s space agency is prepping for their first soft landing on the Moon today. The mission, called Chandrayaan-2, would make India the fourth country to reach the Moon’s surface -- behind the United States, Russia, and China. The Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-2 mission consists of several parts, including an orbiter to observe the Moon for a year, the ...read more

A study asking men to infer emotions by looking at the others concluded that testosterone does not affect empathy levels. (Credit: El Nariz/Shutterstock) Testosterone often gets a bad rap. The hormone responsible for male sexual development has been linked in studies to aggression and a lack of empathy. People with autism – a developmental condition that can lead to anxiety and trouble interacting with others – also have a hard time empathizing. Since the condition is four time ...read more

(Credit: Knowable Magazine) On March 30, 1981, 25-year-old John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other people. The following year, he went on trial for his crimes. Defense attorneys argued that Hinckley was insane, and they pointed to a trove of evidence to back their claim. Their client had a history of behavioral problems. He was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, and devised a plan to assassinate a president to impress her. He hounded Jimmy Carter. Then he ta ...read more

Subsurface water on Jupiter's moon Europa is one place humans plan to search for life. This artist's concept shows a massive plume of underground water erupting from the moon's surface. (Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI) As humans explore the solar system, the tantalizing possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life continues to pop up. But the goal of most scientists is to discover existing life on another world, not to accidentally bring it there from Earth. Whether travelers are ro ...read more

Through November 1, students can submit their ideas for naming the Red Planet rover currently known as Mars 2020. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Pathfinder. Opportunity. Curiosity. NASA’s iconic Mars rovers have a history of lofty names. But for the Mars 2020 rover, that iconic name is still missing. Now students have a chance to be a part of the naming process by submitting their name ideas. U.S. students in grades K through 12 are eligible to enter their ideas in the “Name the R ...read more

Earth seen from space. NASA. There isn't another planet in the solar system like Earth. If you were an alien explorer coming into our neck of the galaxy, you'd find a system with four large gas giants, lots of small, rocky objects without much other than rocks, a few larger rocky objects with some ice and four rocky objects with reasonable atmospheres. A cursory scan of the surface of those last objects would find that two of the four are covered almost entirely in basalt -- an iron and m ...read more

(Credit: Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock) It’s no surprise that English sounds different than Japanese. Different characters, syllables and grammatical rules are just the tip of the iceberg for what sets these languages apart. But there is one commonality between the two: The amount of information a native speaker will convey in a given amount of time is almost exactly the same. In a report published today in Science Advances, researchers found that, across 17 different languages, roug ...read more

(Credit: Mitch Gunn/Shutterstock) In American football, players repeatedly suffer major blows to the head. As a result of these repeat hits, many athletes suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that manifests as depression, dementia, aggression and suicidal behavior years to decades after the trauma. But the researchers behind a new study say that a single traumatic brain injury can also have lasting consequences on brain health. A team of scient ...read more