SciStarter and Arizona State University are happy to announce that we’ve received support from the National Science Foundation to host a workshop at North Caroline State University, November 8-9, 2018. This workshop is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening acces ...read more

Amos Barkai discovered this now classic example of predator-prey reversal 30 years ago. Photo Credit: Paul Hanekom (used with permission from Amos Barkai) The year was 1983. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi had just hit theaters, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” topped the charts, and Amos Barkai was a new graduate student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He’d recently gotten his bachelor’s from Tel Aviv University, and was excite ...read more

A preprint recently posted on bioRxiv has garnered a lot of attention – mainly because of its title. The article, from Jan Willem Koten Jr et al., is called Occurrence of non-western magic in the European brain, an intriguing although not very informative title for a scientific paper. The intrigue deepens once we read the paper and find references to the famous ‘voodoo correlations’ and also a new species of neuro-monster: ‘zombie oscillations’, which the authors cl ...read more

(Credit: Oteera/shutterstock) Give up smoking for cheesecake? Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. People who quit smoking cigarettes often gain weight. That’s not necessarily because ex-smokers need a new habit and they enjoy eating. It’s because the nicotine in cigarettes suppresses appetite to some degree. When the nicotine stops, appetite returns and people can put on pounds. The correlation between quitting smoking and weight gain has been observed in many studies. And ...read more

Students in India surfing the web. Many in the country still lack internet access. (Credit: CRS PHOTO) Despite the name, the World Wide Web … isn’t. Some 52 percent of the world — roughly 4 billion people, mostly women — don’t have access to the open web. This has sparked something like a new space race, featuring satellites, high altitude balloons, drones, even lasers. The rush of startups and tech companies — including SpaceX, Google, Facebook — mak ...read more

Have you looked at SciStarter’s event finder lately? We have exciting new additions, including a new webinar series from BirdSleuth K-12! BirdSleuth K-12, an education program run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, supports educators as they help kids connect to nature and develop science skills by participating in citizen science and inquiry. Their free, hour-long webinar series helps teachers find new ways to get kids outside and observing nature. BirdSleuth K-1 ...read more

Photo: flickr/forevertrusting [Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science paper ...read more

Behold, Minnie, the artificial reading companion. Look at those eyes. Who wouldn’t want to read to a face like that? (Credit: Michaelis and Mutlu, Sci. Robot. 3, eaat5999 (2018)) Back in the day, if parents wanted to encourage their kids to read without, you know, actually reading with them, educational TV programs like Reading Rainbow were the way to go. Now, robots might do the trick, according to a new paper in Science Robotics. It’s Reading Robot Researchers from the Universit ...read more

(Credit: Martina_L/shutterstock) Take a walk through high grass during summer, and you’ll likely have a bunch of grasshoppers tickling your ankles. They are seemingly everywhere. And yet a comprehensive understanding of their evolutionary past has been next to nowhere. That changed earlier this summer when Insect Systematics and Diversity published the largest genetic study ever on the leggy insects. The paper upturned the received wisdom of the grasshopper origin story. Researchers ...read more