The moss Funaria hygrometrica can absorb an impressive amount of lead thanks to a special kind of acid contained in its cell walls. (Credit: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab) Want cleaner drinking water, free of toxins and contaminants? Mother Nature’s here to help. A number of studies have come out over the past year looking at the role different plants could play in remediation, i.e. the removal of dangerous substances. This green technology is known as phytoremediation, from the ...read more

People become less approving of social media outrage the more people join in with it. One person rebuking another is fine, but ten people doing it looks like a mob. This is the key finding of an interesting new paper called The Paradox of Viral Outrage, from Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford. According to the authors, the titular ‘paradox’ is that “individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by ...read more

Here are our picks of the week for educators and learners (and, really, aren’t we all life-long learners?). Each project includes lesson plans aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. Ooooooh! The school bell is about to ring. Here’s to a great year of learning and contributing to science. Cheers! The SciStarter Team Students Discover Students Discover offers projects about that are sure to ignite students’ interest in science. With lesson plans and hands-on activit ...read more

Here there be water! The maps show the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south (left) and north (right) poles. (Credit: NASA) There’s water on the Moon. Twenty years ago, evidence of frost-coated regions near the Moon’s poles was greeted with surprise and skepticism. Ten years ago, a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 space probe greatly boosted the case for water ice on the Moon. Then two weeks ago, a much deeper analysis of the Chandrayaan-1 data val ...read more

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/ Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran) Jupiter is without a doubt inhospitable, but it does have one thing going for it — increasing evidence that it’s rich in water. Astrophysicist Gordon L. Bjoraker of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently published a paper in the Astronomical Journal, outlining how he and his team of researchers detected signatures of water emitting from Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. By studying the gian ...read more

Captured: approximately 15,000 galaxies (12,000 of which are star-forming) widely distributed in time and space. (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)) A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Astronomers are engaged in a lively debate over plans to rename one of the laws of physics. It emerged overnight in Vienna at the 30th Meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), in Vienna, where members of ...read more

SciStarter, the Citizen Science Association, and the Citizen Science Day Working Group are excited to announce Citizen Science Day on Saturday, April 13, 2019! The fourth annual Citizen Science Day celebrates and raises awareness about the amazing volunteers, projects, and scientific breakthroughs that are part of citizen science, encourages new people to get involved, and connects people to local events. All organizations interested in citizen science, including museums, aquariums, nature cent ...read more