Astronomers are almost ready to declare the winner of a decades-old planetary race. ...read more

It took an act of war for doctors to learn how to treat celiac disease. ...read more

Earth Day is April 22, 2019 so take a moment to celebrate our environment and learn more about the biodiversity around us. The first Earth Day was in 1970, and was started to bring attention to environmental protection and preservation. We've selected a few projects related to environmental protection and a global event to participate in, the City Nature Challenge, to encourage focusing on the details and appreciating local biodiversity by taking pictures with the iNaturalist app! Have a w ...read more

Ever since the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has been paying Russia for rides to the International Space Station. They'd hoped that dependency would finally end in 2019. But with its new lineup of flights and launch dates released this week, the space agency acknowledged they're not quite done needing Russia's Soyuz rockets yet. NASA will remain dependent on Russia for the next round of space station rotations. Thanks to delays in commercial launches by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA ...read more

We know more about the surface of the moon than about the ocean floor. Scientists estimate that 91 percent of life under the sea hasn’t been discovered yet and more than 80 percent of the ocean has never been explored. What we do know about the ocean makes it almost more mysterious. It’s an alien landscape, complete with undersea mountain ranges and trenches deeper than Mount Everest is tall, home to a glorious nightmare carnival of weird, often glowing animals. And most of what we ...read more

In October 2017, astronomers announced the first detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars earlier that year. The event also rung in the era of multi-messenger astronomy, as more than 70 telescopes observed the event’s afterglow in optical light, X-rays, gamma rays, and more. Now, an X-ray signal dubbed XT2 from a galaxy 6.6 billion light-years away has revealed another neutron star merger, which left behind a single, heavier neutron star with an incredibly powe ...read more

Stars in the night sky appear as tiny points of light because they are too far away for your eyes to resolve. But even through powerful telescopes, stars still appear as mere points because they are too small to see their true physical size at vast distances. Now, a group of astronomers from over 20 different institutions has found a way to combine a unique telescope array with passing asteroids to measure the diameter of two distant stars, including the smallest star directly measured to da ...read more

A Swedish company called Emotra make a device to detect someone's risk of suicide based on measuring the body's autonomic responses to certain sounds. It's called EDOR®. I've been blogging about this machine for the past 18 months (1, 2, 3) because such a product, if it worked, would be very important. It could help save countless lives. Unfortunately, I don't think EDOR® has been proven to be effective. As I've argued in my previous posts, the evidence just isn't there yet. Now, i ...read more

Why don’t kids like math and science? Based on my many years of teaching elementary math and science, I know that when kids are bored with these subjects, it’s usually because they don’t see the point of how these subjects could be useful or interesting in the context of their real lives. Kids want to apply their math and science skills to make things happen! One great way to help them do this and see the value of these subjects is to introduce the idea of citizen science. Cit ...read more

In Nebraska, scientists working for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission are increasingly relying on casual researchers and citizen scientists to better understand three creatures in particular: spotted skunks, salamanders, and regal fritillary and monarch butterflies. Why? The populations of these species have either declined or are in jeopardy, and scientists want to get a current population count. Let's take a closer look at these three Nebraskan citizen science projects and what researcher ...read more