For as brilliant as the human mind can be, there are still limitations that hinder the potential of our brains. The most baffling instance of our mental shortcomings is related to how we think. Despite the brain boasting billions of neurons that dictate our every move, humans have a surprisingly constrained thought process, and scientists may now have answers to explain this mystery of human inefficiency. A new study recently published in the journal Neuron has quantified the speed of human tho ...read more

Of late, health enthusiasts have seen the numerous benefits of golden orange turmeric. The spice comes from the rhizome, the root of a tree that’s traditionally grown in Asia. It can be used in all sorts of spicy cooking, such as smoothies, lattes, and so on.Its health benefits have become so widely known that many people now take turmeric supplements for everything from joint health to cardiovascular disease and more recently, in helping to shed those extra pounds. The Heath Benefits of Turm ...read more

Taking five or six years to read 18 lines of Latin might seem slow. But the painstaking effort was worthwhile, because archeologists who deciphered a tiny note tucked inside a nearly 1800-year-old, 1.4-inch-tall amulet found that the passage shed new light on Christianity’s spread through Northern Europe.Archeologists first discovered the amulet in a cemetery just outside Frankfurt during a 2017 to 2018 dig. Based on where they found the amulet in the grave, the archaeologists suspect that the ...read more

Early this morning, the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory reported that a new eruption started in the summit caldera at Kīlauea in Hawai'i. After a brief swarm of earthquakes, a series of fissures opened in the floor of the Halema'uma'u caldera, producing lava fountains and flows that have now crept along the caldera floor. This is only the third eruption at Kīlauea this year after the fall's small eruption in the East Rift zone near Napau Crater and June's brief eruption in the Southwest Rift Z ...read more

Every so often, news headlines warn of an outbreak of kennel cough. Pet parents are cautioned to keep their dogs away from dog parks, kennels, or daycares. In extreme cases, animal shelters close, and rescue transports are halted. In July 2024, for example, a severe kennel cough outbreak hit animal shelters in Delaware. Public health officials issued a temporary, one-month lockdown to stop the spread.The lockdown prevented animal shelters from receiving new animals from out-of-state organizatio ...read more

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