This summer, whether you're at home, fishing on a lake, or walking along the beach, consider getting involved in one or more of the citizen science projects featured below. Each one empowers us to keep an eye on the health of our water sources.
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Stream Selfie
More than one-third of us drink water that runs through streams. But how clean are those streams? To find out, we first need to know where they are. Share a picture of your local s ...read more
The crew capsule and its launch abort safety system lifted off on time from Cape Canaveral. (Credit: NASA)
On Tuesday morning at 7am EDT, NASA successfully completed the final major flight test for their Orion crew capsule. This is the new craft NASA will use to transport humans to the Moon and Mars as a new age of space exploration begins.
The Artemis Moon mission is slated to begin next year with an uncrewed flight to the Moon. With this final flight test cleared, that should be the ne ...read more
A highly acclaimed neuroscientist whose work offered hope for many patients with brain injury has fallen from grace.
Niels Birbaumer. From https://www.wysscenter.ch/person/niels-birbaumer-phd/
Prof. Niels Birbaumer, of the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, came under investigation earlier this year. The probe began after researcher Martin Spüler raised serious concerns over a 2017 paper in PLoS Biology by Ujwal Chaudhary et al. Birbaumer was the senior author.
...read more
(Credit: Erin McGrady/Shutterstock)
(Inside Science) -- Big, black wasplike things living in your toilet may sound more like a horror scene than a sanitation solution. That's certainly what people in rural Louisiana thought in the summer of 1930, when black soldier flies infested a set of newly installed privies.
"[C]onsiderable consternation often resulted when a person lifted a privy lid and was greeted by a swarm of insects resembling wasps, or when upon leaving the privy he experience ...read more
The launch abort system for NASA's Orion crew capsule will undergo its final test on Tuesday. (Credit: NASA)
NASA has big plans for human spaceflight, aiming to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, a mission they're calling Artemis. To carry those astronauts, NASA has been developing the new Orion crew capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket powerful enough to launch beyond low-Earth orbit.
On Tuesday morning, NASA will test the launch abort safety system for ...read more
The diamond ring phase over Newberry, South Carolina, during the total solar eclipse August 21, 2017. (Credit: Michael Roudabush/Wikimedia Commons)
Tuesday, July 2, will bring a special kind of darkness to South America. In certain parts of Chile and Argentina, people will find a strange twilight falling as the Moon inches across and ultimately covers the Sun’s disk completely in a total solar eclipse lasting just over two minutes for most observers.
For those lucky people in the pat ...read more
The nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 has a system of seven Earth-size planets, all jammed into a space much smaller than the gap between the Sun and Mercury. (Credit: ESO/O. Furtak)
When I was an astronomy-obsessed kid, I learned that most of the stars in our galaxy and beyond are very similar to our Sun. No less an authority than Carl Sagan wrote that "the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star." If that insight diminished the importance of our place in the universe, it also made it seem ...read more
This very blog forms a large part of a newly published study on research methods blogs in psychology. The paper has a spicy backstory.
Back in 2016, psychologist Susan Fiske caused much consternation with a draft article which branded certain (unnamed) bloggers as being “bullies” and “destructo-critics” who “destroy lives” through “methodological terrorism.”
Fiske's post (which later appeared in a more moderate version) was seen as pushba ...read more
An artistic representation of a white hole. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Discover)
It was no less a luminary than Isaac Newton who taught us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Push on the wall, and it pushes back. With that in mind, cosmic "white holes" make a lot of sense — they seem inevitable, even.
We all know about black holes, those cosmic vacuum cleaners that suck in anything (including light) that gets too close. Well, what about th ...read more
This petri dish contains fungus samples collected from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Anywhere humans go, we bring companions along, in the form of bacteria and mold. Some of them, like gut bacteria, are essential for healthy living. Others are mere tagalongs. As hospitals well know, even the spaces meant to be most clean still teem with microbial life, and the International Space Station is no exception.
Astronauts have been cataloging the presence of microbes in sp ...read more
