Jupiter’s family has really grown since Galileo first recorded its four largest moons in 1610. On Tuesday, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced the discovery of 10 new moons orbiting Jupiter. Along with two found through the same research project but announced in June 2017, this brings the roster of Jupiter’s known natural satellites to 79. One of these new moons turned out to be a bit of a rebel. Of the 12 latest moons to join Jupiter&ac ...read more

News out of Hawaii today is that we have had one first major injury event related to Kīlauea's ongoing lower East Rift Zone eruption. A tour boat sailing near the ocean entry from the Fissure 8 lava flows was struck by volcanic debris thrown by an explosion, injuring at least 23 people and tearing a hole through the roof of the boat (see below). The boat was apparently outside the 300 meter safety zone near the ocean entry (although some news reports say the b ...read more

We've become accustomed to striking imagery of wildfires captured by earth-monitoring satellites, including weather satellites stationed about 26,000 miles from the surface. That may seem amazing enough (it always does to me). But check out the image above of a plume of wildfire smoke so big and thick that it was visible to a satellite nearly a million miles away. Make sure to click on the image so see a larger version, and then click again to enlarge it. You'll see a f ...read more

Earth's interior is dark, but filled with diamonds. A study published Monday estimates the composition of deep rock layers known as cratons and concludes that they may be far more glittery than previously suspected. Parts of Earth's mantle may be up to two percent diamond by composition, far more than previously suspected. In terms of sheer mass, that works out to around a quadrillion, or thousand trillion, tons of diamond. Sparkly Science A team led by a researcher from the Univers ...read more

Last week, on Monday, July 9, Darlene Cavalier, the founder of SciStarter and Science Cheerleader and a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, presented on a panel at a American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) event. The panel was part of a larger two-day conference hosted by ASEE for engineering communicators. The panel was moderated by Pamela Phetphongsy, Assistant Dean for Communications at the Cla ...read more

Five “Jawsâ€�-dropping projects for Shark Week   As a prelude to the Discovery Channel’s 30th year of Shark Week, SciStarter’s editors picked these five projects you can do related to sharks and their conservation. Whether it’s collecting and reporting shark egg cases or documenting sightings to track species, there are many ways to unlock your inner elasmobranchologistÂ&nb ...read more

Agriculture is thought to have been developed 11,000 years ago in the Levant, where Iraq, Israel and Jordan are today. But in recent years, archaeologists have discovered sites in the region suggesting hunter-gatherers were making use of crops thousands of years earlier. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers reveals that foragers in northeastern Jordan were baking bread from wild cereals more than 14 millennia ago. C ...read more

Astronomers can sometimes be literal to a fault. We like to call things as we see them. For example, if it’s red and it’s huge: “Red Giant.� White and small: “White Dwarf.� Massive explosion: “Big Bang.� Dark and sucks everything in: “Black Hole.� Most of the time, classifying objects this way works fine& ...read more

A paper just published reports that Republicans are more likely to have used the adultery website Ashley Madison than Democrats, while Libertarians were even more likely to do so. That's a claim that could ruffle some feathers, but the way in which the researchers conducted this study might be even more controversial. That's because this paper is based on the 2015 Ashley Madison data leak, which exposed the personal data, including names and credit-card details, of millions of registered ...read more

It has been an unpleasant few weeks here in Colorado. Brutal heat and air pollution have made many of my daily runs along trails like the one above challenging — to put it mildly. Recurrent poor air quality has taken a particular toll. Smoke from eight major wildfires burning in Colorado — more than anywhere else in the contiguous United States right now — has mixedÂ&nbs ...read more