An Adventure to Venus Though widespread interest in Venus has somewhat waned over recent decades, India’s upcoming mission aims to turn that tide. As part of a still unnamed mission, ISRO will launch an approximately 5,500-pound (2,500-kilogram) spacecraft aboard the heaviest rocket they currently operate: the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. The sheer size and power of this three-stage rocket will enable the spacecraft to ferry a full suite of instruments, weighing up to ...read more

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Researchers have discovered another Milky Way satellite that’s as large as the LMC but is 10,000 times fainter. (Credit: ESA/NASA/Hubble) A Strange New Galaxy An unusual, enormous, and ancient dwarf galaxy looms near the Milky Way, 424,000 light-years away from Earth in the Antlia constellation, a new study found using data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft. Scientists estimate that dozens o ...read more

(Credit: kletr/Shutterstock) In chimpanzee societies, a whistle followed by a high-pitched hoot seems to mean, “I’m leaving.” Energetic grunts probably say “good food.” And a hip thrust could signal that chimp is ready to get frisky. These rough translations result from decades of research on chimp communication. In addition to revealing what apes are saying (big surprise: food and sex), the results also reflect why and how chimps communicate — and how this ...read more

An older version of an ultra-stable ytterbium lattice atomic clock at NIST. Ytterbium atoms are generated in an oven (large metal cylinder on the left) and sent to a vacuum chamber in the center of the photo to be manipulated and probed by lasers. Laser light is transported to the clock by five fibers (such as the yellow fiber in the lower center of the photo). (Credit: Burrus/NIST) Time, like money, only seems important when it’s running out. But to physicists, time is always a big deal ...read more

(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