It’s typical to encounter weeds around one’s backyard plants. But mastodon teeth? Not so much.A couple in Scotchtown, New York spotted what turned out to be the tip of a fossil iceberg. After they found two teeth hiding behind some fronds, they dug a bit deeper and detected two more. Then they decided to reach out for help.“When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to call in the experts,” the resident, who wishes to remain anony ...read more
First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way.That recognition has spawned numerous studies, some of them surprisingly serious, to test the limits of causality. In this work, physicists have tried everything from bending the fabric of spacetime to exploiting quantum uncert ...read more
If you think of bird flu as a stew, it appears that the latest batch has been simmering on low heat for a few years — at least for humans. Could it boil over into a pandemic?Although there has been a slight uptick in human cases since the avian flu subtype named H5N1 appeared in North America about four years ago, science suggests that a full-fledged human pandemic is unlikely. “There's no human-to-human transmission,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevent ...read more
After a series of technical hiccups prevented Boeing’s Starliner capsule from bringing NASA astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore back to Earth in August 2024, it appears that yet another delay will keep the two in space for an extra few months. Suni and Butch, who were launched aboard the first ever crewed mission of the Starliner (the Boeing Crew Flight Test) in June 2024, will now have to wait until late March 2025 or early April 2025 to return home. What Went Wrong w ...read more
In 2024, volunteers like you made more than 2.5 MILLION data contributions to SciStarter Affiliate projects alone! Science thanks you! And while we appreciate each and every one of you, in this year-end edition of the newsletter, we highlight the top 10 participants based on data contributions.You’ll also find our Top Ten Projects based on participation in projects ranging from tracking squirrels to discovering black holes; Top Five Projects to Watch in 2025; and citizen science in the news t ...read more
It’s easy to forget that humans are primates, but indeed we are. Taxonomic classification puts humans in the order Primates (apes, monkeys, and lemurs) and in the family Hominidae (great apes), which, in addition to humans, includes chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Humans are different from other primates in several ways, our facility with spoken and written language being one of the most obvious.But another obvious difference is that somewhere along the evolutionary path, human ...read more
In 2025, Saturn’s spectacular rings will disappear. But it won’t be too long before they come back into sight in all their splendor. Their disappearance, after all, is all a matter of perspective.A combination of thin rings, Saturn’s tilt, and Earth’s own orbital movements will make the rings disappear from our perspective. Saturn’s rings will be nearly edge on for the whole year, but we will see them totally edge on in March and November, says Jonti Horner, astrobiologist and astronom ...read more
On a fairly regular basis, my chocolate-brown chihuahua mix will get territorial about some limbless, chewed-up toy that no one else wants. She’ll prowl around with the toy in her mouth, hackles raised, while growling to warn that the headless elf from last Christmas is all hers. The rest of us will ignore her, and eventually, she’ll relax. Or she’ll cool it when I inform her that she can’t come up on the couch until she stops.My little dog isn’t the only one who has territorial behav ...read more
As the year winds down, we wanted to take a look back at some of the top scientific discoveries that happened in 2024. From groundbreaking medical advances, major space exploration, and ancient genetics, here are some of the year's most exciting advancements.1. HIV Prevention Drug Lenacapavir Has Shocking Results In 2022, health organizations across the globe, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S., approved the drug lenacapavir as a treatment for HIV/AIDS. In 2024, the r ...read more
In the 1950s, an urban legend about the Atlantic Ocean surfaced. According to the lore, a mysterious area formed a triangle from Bermuda to South Florida down to Puerto Rico. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the region was supposedly where ships, planes, and people mysteriously disappeared.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service (NOAA) says there are scientific explanations for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, and the area doesn’t have any more disappearances than other well-traveled r ...read more
