By Nina Friedman, SciStarter.com blog contributor
For decades, fair- and festival-goers around the country have volunteered to step right up and have a carnival busker guess their age. Now, guessing someone’s age through citizen science can contribute to research in the social and computer sciences and medicine, too.
Everyday scientists and medical professionals are creating lifespan increasing technologies. Researchers across the globe are bettering our health so quickly that the averag ...read more
Don't let the ferocious name of a new armored dinosaur found in Montana fool you: Zuul crurivastator (the new genus is a nod to the main Ghostbusters villain) is actually quite the softie. At least in terms of soft tissue. The wonderfully preserved specimen has loads of it, opening up a lot of possibilities for further research.
Zuul roamed North America about 75 million years ago and was about as badass as an herbivore can be. It was a large ankylosaurine, one of the armor-plated dinos ...read more
Buttons, who needs 'em?
A new proof-of-concept technology from Carnegie Mellon University turns everyday objects into touch interfaces with an array of electrodes. Walls, guitars, toys and steering wheels come alive with touch sensitivity in their video, and it seems that the possibilities are pretty much endless. What could be next? Grocery store aisles? Whole buildings? Other people? Cell phones?
The design is called Electrick, and it comes from Carnegie Mellon's Future Interfaces Gr ...read more
Astronomers are cracking the secrets of our solar system within the oldest rocks — on Earth and beyond.
The oldest object known to humans fell from the sky on Feb. 8, 1969, with the furor of a divine omen. The blue-white fireball streaked over northern Mexico at 1:05 a.m., ending with a staccato of booms heard from hundreds of miles away. A small asteroid had struck Earth’s atmosphere and exploded — raining thousands of fragments over the desert. NASA dispatched scientists ...read more
Once this iceberg drifts into the ocean, the shelf behind it might collapse. That’s similar to what happened at Larsen B, which will likely disintegrate completely by 2020. However, NASA JPL ice shelf scientist Ala Khazendar cautions that Larsen C’s future remains uncertain. Ice shelves naturally shed icebergs, and this ice shelf could recover and avoid the fate of Larsens A and B.
If the floating Larsen C does collapse, it won’t raise sea levels directly. But once an ice shelf ...read more
