A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,  “Learning Through Citizen Science: Enhancing Opportunities by Design” in now available in print. “In the last twenty years, citizen science has blossomed as a way to engage a broad range of individuals in doing science. Citizen science projects focus on, but are not limited to, nonscientists participating in the processes of scientific research, with the intended goal of advancing and us ...read more

Last November, scientists' minds were blown by the discovery of a 19-mile-wide crater under Greenland. The crater had been hiding in plain sight just 150 miles from a major air force base. Scientists flying airborne surveys with NASA’s Operation IceBridge found it serendipitously while testing their equipment while en route to collect Arctic data. And, on Monday, the same group announced they’ve found another potential impact crater that's even larger, and it sits ...read more

As humans get more ambitious with their plans for exploring Mars, we’re going to need to land bigger spacecraft on its surface. Up until now, NASA's robotic missions have used parachutes, inflatable bubbles, and sky cranes, as well as descent rockets. But to land the kind of heavy spaceships that can carry human astronauts to Mars, engineers will need new methods to touch down. At the moment, most spacecraft rely on parachutes to slow down from a whopping Mach 30 or so as they enter the M ...read more

Ever catch yourself letting out a frustrated sigh, a squeal of delight or maybe a gasp of terror? These off-the-cuff vocalizations are called vocal bursts. And in a new study, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have mapped out a record number of them. To start things off, the researchers asked 56 people, some professional actors and some not, to react to different emotional scenarios. From these reactions, the team recorded more than 2,000 vocal bursts. Next, they ...read more

I thought it would be helpful to provide a description of what SciStarter’s Participant API is and why a growing number of projects and platforms are implementing it and becoming SciStarter Affiliates in the process. A little background. SciStarter had been “merely” a database where project scientists would add their projects and citizen scientists would find projects. As PBS, Discover, NSTA and others started embedding our Project Finder, more and more people were a ...read more

An exercise-induced hormone linked to a range of benefits might add another to its repertoire: protection against Alzheimer's disease. A new paper, published in Nature Medicine, explains that the hormone irisin, released by our bodies when we exert ourselves, seems to offer protection against the memory loss and brain damage associated with Alzheimer's. In those with the disease, however, irisin levels are depleted. Boosting irisin levels through exercise, then, might be a way to stav ...read more

Since at least the early '80s, the world has been getting greener. Satellite data show plants cover more and more land every year. That's happening even as deforestation increases in the tropics. Scientists have attributed some of the greening to climate change and an effect called CO2 fertilization, where rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels fuel photosynthesis, the process plants use to make food, and in turn help plants grow. Now researchers have discovered that agriculture - expan ...read more

If a tree drops in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Humans may never know, but mosquitoes might. Until now, it was thought that mosquitoes could only hear a few inches away, but new research shows that they can detect sound from up to 32 feet away. This surprising ability allows Aedes aegypti mosquitos to track down distant mates and even tune in to human speech. The study, published on February 7 in the journal Current Biology, also offers another sur ...read more

In the desert town of Lajamanu, Australia, at the bend of a narrow dirt road, Carmel O’Shannessy worked at a school as a teacher-linguist in the early 2000s. Lajamanu’s Indigenous Warlpiri people, who live in the country’s Northern Territory, were skilled at drawing sustenance from the landscape’s parched red soil, and O’Shannessy soon discovered hidden cultural riches the Warlpiri had stored up. As she got to know the children in the community, O’Shannessy n ...read more

In 1970, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre was forced to address a tricky new issue in the realm of women in space: the validity of pants in the workplace.  Women and pants have a strange relationship throughout the 20th century, and further back, too, though for the moment we aren't going to get into Joan of Arc wearing men's armour. Pants — or trousers or slacks — began the last century as men's clothing, but it wasn't long before exceptions started to appear in th ...read more