The private rocket company laid out a handful of groundbreaking plans over the weekend. (Credit: SpaceX) Elon Musk gave a barrage of updates on the future of SpaceX as he stood in front of the company’s new Starship and original Falcon rockets on Saturday in Boca Chica, Texas. During the presentation, Musk touched on the details in Starship’s design, the possibilities for the craft, and the timeline of what’s to come in the near future. SpaceX thinks Starship could bring ...read more

Trevor McIntyre faces off against a male southern elephant seal. His job was to distract aggressive males with a broomstick while his colleagues checked on other seals or glued tracking devices to their heads. (Credit: Phathutshedzo M. Radzilani) (Inside Science) -- The first time Paul Krausman jumped out of a helicopter and wrestled a deer to the ground was in 1978. Another researcher had shot a net over the deer moments before, but the animal was not sedated, and it fought hard until Kraus ...read more

The Hubble Space Telescope appears to float above Earth in this image taken by an Atlantis crewmember in 2009. (Credit: NASA) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched into orbit on the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Thanks to its perch above most of Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, the telescope’s relatively modest 2.4-meter mirror has given us an unprecedented window on the universe for nearly 30 years. But just how much longer will Hubble last? ...read more

Shipping traffic accounts for a larger percentage of plastic trash in some parts of the oceans than scientists realized. (Credit: Stephane Bidouze) Rafts of garbage, assembled by currents that swirl trash together, clog our oceans. But how did that material wind up far from shore in the first place? A new study takes a look at the refuse that washes up on a remote island in the South Atlantic and arrives at a perhaps unexpected answer: The trash is being dumped from ships. The findings, p ...read more

Being in a relationship might make a man more attractive to women. (Credit: Roman Seliutin/Shutterstock) Here’s an option for men struggling to find female partners: Hire a professional wing woman for a night on the town. A beautiful, charismatic lady companion will help ease you into conversations with prospective dates — at least that's the claim companies touting the service make. But there may be another hidden advantage to your female companion, one rooted deep in our min ...read more

‘Oumuamua, the first-known interstellar interloper, is seen venting gas and dust in this artist’s concept. (Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser) Back in 2017, astronomers discovered the first interstellar object, 'Oumuamua, as it swung through our solar system. And, just a few weeks ago, scientists spotted a second one paying us a visit, called C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). Now astronomers are saying they could soon be discovering many new interstellar comets. A new telescope ...read more

Portions of this blog post are excerpted from the accompanying podcast episode and from notes shared between the SciStarter team and Kobi Gal’s research team. Smart Project Recommendations on SciStarter With thousands of projects listed on SciStarter, a main challenge can be finding the right project, one that really suits your needs and your interests. After meeting at a workshop on the Open Science of Learning hosting by CRI, Kobi Gal, a leading expert in human-centered artific ...read more

https://youtu.be/Y1HpsJaNfIY Hurricane Lorenzo, howling in the North Atlantic on the evening of Saturday September 28, 2019 and into Sunday the 29th, as seen by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Note: The video cycles through several times. Source: CIRA/RAMMB) On Thursday, Sept. 26, the National Hurricane Center described Hurricane Lorenzo as "one of the largest and most powerful hurricanes of record for the central tropical Atlantic, with the only comparable hurricane [near there] in recent ...read more

The National Weather Service is warning that "a significant, very early-season winter storm will enter the Northern Rockies Saturday. A host of potentially dangerous impacts will result from this type of early winter storm." Historic snow and a heat wave? That's what a downright loopy jet stream pattern is bringing to large parts of the United States. Parts of the Northern Rockies are bracing for what the National Weather Service in Missoula, MT is describing as an "historic winter storm ...read more

Thanks to human-caused warming, an area of ice three times the size of Texas went missing this year https://youtu.be/3aS-4JB88b4 Arctic sea ice shriveled so much during this summer's now-finished melt season that it has reached the second lowest extent on record. A sensitive indicator of human-caused warming, the low extent of the region's floating lid of ice effectively tied with 2007 and 2016 for second place in satellite records extending back 40 years, according to the National S ...read more