(Credit: GagliardiImages/Shutterstock)
More than 800 women die every day from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Part of the reason for this is that scientists still don’t well understand how the placenta works, including how it is implanted into the uterus during a pregnancy.
Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have created mini-placentas that grow in a dish. The advance provides researchers the ability to study how the placenta works in the lab, with the ...read more
He talks to Matthew Porteus of Stanford during a panel talk following his presentation. (Credit: Ernie Mastroianni/Discover)
HONG KONG — Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who claims to have edited the genomes of twin infant girls to protect them from HIV while they were embryos, presented his work today at a conference at the University of Hong Kong.
The controversial claim was first reported Sunday by the The Associated Press and through a series of YouTube videos, though no pape ...read more
A collage of two images; on the left, the title page from the first Royal Society publication, andon the right, the cover for its recent greenhouse gas removal report.
England’s Royal Society, the national academy founded in November 1660, is still churning out loads of scientific excellence. In this blog, a current fellow shares how we can all help combat climate change.
On Nov. 28, 1660, English scientist Christopher Wren spoke at Gresham College in Central London, launching what is n ...read more
Image Credit: Pixabay
This fall, students everywhere were treated to a citizen science virtual field trip organized by Discovery Education and the Girl Scouts of the USA. “Unleash Your Inner Scientist,” the title of virtual field trip, featured SciStarter’s Founder, Darlene Cavalier, and was filmed on location at the 92-acre STEM Center of Excellence in Dallas, Texas. No worries if you missed it when it originally aired because the full-length virtual field trip video ...read more
A health worker administrates polio-vaccine drops to a child during an anti-polio immunization campaign on March 09, 2017 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. (Credit: Asianet-Pakistan/Shutterstock)
Polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 people each year worldwide. Today, vaccines have dropped the number of reported cases to just 407 in 2013, according to the CDC.
But the disease still lurks in developing countries because vaccine storage and transport requires refrigeration. Now, scientists find freeze-d ...read more
MarCO-B took this image of Mars from about 4,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away during its flyby of the planet on Nov. 26, 2018. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Groundbreaking CubeSats
Yesterday, NASA’s InSight lander touched down successfully on the martian surface in a flawless feat of engineering.
Two briefcase-sized satellites known as CubeSats followed the exploratory probe all the way from Earth to the Red Planet. These twin Cubesats are the first of their kind to ever travel to ano ...read more
The fiery behavior of a star can be observed as sound waves. A pair of astronomers has built an AI network to better study stars using these sound waves. (Credit: NASA)
Star Sound Waves
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and sound waves, researchers have found a possible means of looking inside stars.
It’s based on the fact that stars aren’t solid objects — far from it, in fact. They’re intense, vibrating balls of plasma held together by their own gravity and with ...read more
Planet Nine could be lurking in the outer solar system, or it could join the ranks of other discredited planets. (Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
In 2016, astronomers announced there was a new planet in the outer solar system. Planet Nine, supposedly larger than Neptune and located far beyond the orbits of the planets known so far, is a particular mystery since no one has yet observed it. Scientists have merely tracked its supposed orbit by watching the gravitational pull th ...read more
Insight’s first image of Mars. NASA.
NASA’s InSight lander reached Mars yesterday. It’s the seventh successful landed mission, and it’s the latest in our continuous presence on the red planet since 1997. Yup, we’ve had a rover or a lander doing science on Mars non stop for over 20 years! But landers like InSight don’t get enough love. They seem less exciting than their roving cousins, but these stationary missions have done some really incredible science. Reg ...read more
(Credit: Daniel Eskridge/Shutterstock)
One day, about 11,000 years ago, a lone bull mastodon plodded through the shallows of a lake in what today is Michigan. Some time later, three females and a gamboling calf passed the same way. Luckily for paleontologists, clay-rich mud filled the animals’ footprints, preserving the tracks and giving scientists insights into the mastodons’ social structure. The long-extinct creatures likely lived in matriarchal herds, while mature males roamed ...read more
