In what may be a world first, a peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Psychology, has published a song. The musical contribution to science is called 'It's Hard Work Being No One', and it comes from psychologist J. Scott Jordan of the Illinois State University. Here's some of the lyrics, which deal with nothing less than the existential question of identity: I got a ticket on the next train to OZ Gotta see that crazy wizard because Even tin man was an I, just had no heart Scarecrow was ...read more

The Future of Martian Bots Mars has been home to robots since the 1990s. Rolling over the rocky terrain, martian robots have endured dust storms, radiation and the hardships of life on the Red Planet. New software from the UK could allow these robots to drive themselves around the rocky martian terrain and enable them to explore farther than ever before. It currently takes about eight minutes (each way) for commands and communication to travel to or from Mars, so robots guided by huma ...read more

The Ice of Mercury Mercury, the closest planet to our sun and the second hottest, also has glaciers. That may come as a surprise, but it's due to the fact that the planet has no tilt, and so the bottom of some deep craters near the poles are left permanently shadowed. With no atmosphere, the planet's night side quickly loses heat and dips far below freezing, allowing ice to form and accumulate in regions that never see the sun. Now, new models reveal incredible details about how glaciers f ...read more

What if your ability to feed yourself was dependent on a process that made a mistake 20 percent of the time? We face this situation every day. That’s because the plants that produce the food we eat evolved to solve a chemistry problem that arose billions of years ago. Plants evolved to use carbon dioxide to make our food and the oxygen we breathe – a process called photosynthesis. But they grew so well and produced so much oxygen that this gas began to dominate the atmosphere. To pl ...read more

Dear Librarian, Libraries and similar venues are public spaces where community members, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, economic level, or education level, can engage in a variety of activities.  May we suggest citizen science, which enables ordinary people to advance real scientific research?  Professional scientists need your help, and connecting through citizen science projects offers robust opportunities for patrons to address local or global concerns and to stoke ...read more

Today, when we've unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya writing and hosts of far lesser known scripts, it seems as though there's nothing left for enterprising epigraphers. Fear not, for there are actually a number of ancient writing systems still to be cracked. They include texts of the Olmec and Zapotec (Mesoamerican cultures preceding the Classic Maya), Proto-Elamite (writings of the earliest civilization of present-day Iran) and Rongorongo of Easter Island. But if it's fa ...read more

For more than a hundred years, the United States government has paired university scientists with local farmers to study how best to feed the world. These extension programs helped to more than double agricultural production in the U.S. between 1948 and 2001 by sharing knowledge between farmers and university researchers. These extension programs—which bring knowledge gained through research to agriculture and knowledge gained through practice to education—helped to more than dou ...read more

Making Lunar History For the first time in history, a spacecraft has landed on the far side of the moon. At 10:26 am, Jan. 3 Beijing time, China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft made a successful soft landing in the Von Kármán crater within the moon's South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. A few hours after the landing, the craft sent back its first close shot of the far side of the lunar surface via the relay communication satellite Queqiao, according to the state-run China Gl ...read more

Landing on the Far Side Nearly a month after launching from Earth, China’s Chang’e-4 mission is set to make a historic lunar landing, according to news reports. The spacecraft's exact landing time has not yet been specified. But, if all goes according to plan, the craft will be the first in history to land on the far side of the moon either today or tomorrow (January 3). The spacecraft is currently orbiting about 9 miles (15 km) above the lunar surface. The ...read more

Though we call the last several decades of computational invention the Information Age, we might better look thousands of years in the past to see its true beginnings. That's when writing, a system that has served as the basis for our collective store of information ever since, began. This revolutionary idea likely emerged four times in human history: in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. In each case, it seems that people with no prior exposure to writing invented symboli ...read more