One million species are threatened with extinction, more than ever before in human history, according to a landmark report released Monday from the United Nations. And humanity is responsible. "Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing," said Josef Settele, an ecologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany, who co-chaired the new assessment, in a statement. "Th ...read more

At the start of World War I, thousands of soldiers were coming down with a baffling condition: they became blind, deaf, lost their memory, or developed uncontrollable shaking despite no obvious physical injury. Even stranger, this malady could be triggered by memories of the war even after the fighting had ended. At the time, doctors called what they were seeing “shell-shock,” though today we would call it by a different name: post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that brought bac ...read more

(Inside Science) -- One of the strangest things about quantum mechanics is that a particle can act like a wave. In particular, in a double-slit experiment, individual particles that are shot through a pair of slits create a pattern as if they each went through both slits simultaneously and interfered with themselves. Researchers have now shown for the first time that antimatter behaves in the same unintuitive way. Antimatter particles correspond to the regular particles that we are used t ...read more

Before the planets in our solar system formed or the sun turned on and started shining, two other stars had to die. Their deaths and later collision would seed the area where our area with many of the heavy materials needed for life on Earth. Now, 4.6 billion years later, astronomers are piecing together the story of these long-dead stars. To do this, researchers studied different ways to make the heavy elements in question – exploding stars or violent collisions between st ...read more

Rod Serling knew all about dimensions. His Twilight Zone was a dimension of imagination, a dimension of sight and sound and mind, a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It was all very clear except for the space and time part, the dimensions of real life. Serling never explained them. Of course, ever since Einstein, scientists have also been scratching their heads about how to make sense of space and time. Before then, almost everybody thought Isaac Newton had figur ...read more

A team of researchers at the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University seek to understand what causes a 30% reduction of blood flow to the brain in Alzheimer’s patients. Preliminary findings from the Schaffer-Nishimura Biomedical Engineering Lab suggest that restoring blood flow to the brain could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s and restore cognitive functioning. But there is too much data to sift through, and the blood flow imagery is too subtle for most ...read more

The Hubble Space Telescope has outdone itself once again. By leveraging multiple deep surveys that peer across the cosmos and back to the first 500 million years after the Big Bang, astronomers have created the deepest, widest portrait yet of the distant universe. Astronomers combined 7,500 exposures containing 265,000 galaxies into one image representing more than 250 days of Hubble observing time. Like other deep surveys, astronomers can use it as a time capsule from the early universe, a ...read more

In 1902, famed fossil hunter Barnum Brown was prospecting in Montana when he discovered the first documented remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The creature was nearly 40 feet long with banana-sized teeth, warranting its name, “king of the tyrant lizards.” Finds since then have only reinforced T. rex’s status as one of the planet’s most ferocious predators ever. We now know that — in a world of large plant-eaters — these hunters didn’t just rely on their en ...read more

Impressionist art, or perhaps nightmare fuel — these images are a confusing mess to the human eye. But to a macaque's brain cells, says a group of researchers, the images are fascinating. The pictures are the result of an experiment that paired artificial intelligence with primate intelligence. The goal was to create images specifically tuned to stimulate neurons in a monkey's visual cortex. It's not an attempt to create monkey-centric art. Instead, the jumbled images might help ...read more

Really, any day is a good day to engage in citizen science. Need some inspiration? “American Spring LIVE,” aired last week on PBS NATURE and it featured lots of citizen science projects in need of your help. Catch the recorded series on Facebook! Cheers, The SciStarter Team Milkweed Tracker This time of year, caterpillar eggs are beginning to hatch. The caterpillars depend on milkweed for food as they grow and evolve into Monarchs. Help researchers track the locations ...read more