People are matching their faces with famous art — and some of the results are hilarious. They’re using the Google Arts & Culture app, which uses image recognition to scour art collections from more than 1,200 museums, galleries and institutions across the world.
The app has been around since 2016, but recently updated to include a selfie feature that made it take off. Tapping into the curiosity of people and the love of selfies and sharing was a smart move on Google’s ...read more
What a year it has been! We now have more than 50,000 active members participating in over 1,700 projects on SciStarter. We can't wait to see what 2018 brings.
From neurons to whales and everything in between, the 2017 Top 10 Projects are as varied and diverse as their participants. Thanks for making it such a successful year for citizen science.
This list, in no particular order, is based on the 10 projects with the most page views on SciStar ...read more
The first time the Saturn V launched in November of 1967, ceiling tiles in the nearby studio where Walter Cronkite was reporting from live fell to the floor. The power of the five F-1 engines was astonishing, and their combined 7.5 million pounds of thrust hasn't yet been matched. But there were more engines than just those five biggest ones. All told, it took 83 engines to get an Apollo mission to the Moon and safely back to Earth.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2c9LPNRonQ ...read more
Scientists and engineers who worked for MIT's Radiation Laboratory had a saying about World War II: The atomic bomb may have ended the war, but radar won it. A new PBS documentary makes the case for that bold statement by telling the story of Alfred Lee Loomis, a founder of the Radiation Lab and a millionaire Wall Street tycoon who directed the U.S. government's wartime effort to develop radar technologies into effective weapons. But even before ...read more
The ability to read and understand a passage of text underpins the pursuit of knowledge, and was once a uniquely human cognitive activity. But 2018 marks the year that, by one measure, machines surpassed humans’ reading comprehension abilities.
Both Alibaba and Microsoft recently tested their respective artificial neural networks with The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), which is an arduous test of a machine’s natural language processing skills. It’s a dataset that ...read more
Ooh, shiny! The newest dinosaur on the paleoscene is more than a little eye-catching: Researchers believe the duck-sized Caihong juji was rocking iridescent feathers on its head, wings and tail. If it was indeed so fancy, it's the earliest example in the fossil record of such shimmering finery.
Formally described today, C. juji was discovered in northeastern China, home to many feathered dinosaur finds (but not any tyrannosaurs!). Its name translates from Mandarin as "rainbow with a big ...read more
Mayon in the Philippines hasn't erupted since 2014, but it appears that it is waking up from its brief slumber. PHIVOLCS raised the alert status at Mayon to Level 3 (of 4) after a weekend of steam-driven (phreatic) eruptions and hundreds of earthquakes. This change in alert level came with a mandatory evacuation of people living within 6 kilometers of the volcano and 7 kilometers from the southern side because of the potential for rock falls and pyroclastic flows. Schools in the area have a ...read more
About 40 percent of Americans have problems falling asleep and they spend billions every year on sleep aids and remedies. Instead of spending hard earned cash, falling asleep could be as simple as writing a to-do list.
Previous research has shown writing about worries can help someone quickly get to sleep, but is there a specific type of writing that's more effective? A group of researchers from Baylor University set out to answer that question.
Using polysomnography (t ...read more
Oh, to be a pitcher plant. Unlike most of the animal kingdom, who run around chasing money, antelopes, Twitter mentions and whatnot, pitcher plants just sit there and let it all come to them. It's like being inside one of those money booth things with dollar bills flying around and just letting them stick to your face.
It's not a lifestyle for everyone, of course, but if these guys can make it work, there's hope for the rest of us. I mean, they live on a freaking mountain for Chrissakes. ...read more
“Aw, you still have your baby fat!” This refrain plagued me throughout my childhood. No matter what I did, I couldn’t shake my “baby fat.” I was not a particularly overweight child. I just seemed to maintain the round cheeks and pudgy tummy that most of my friends shed early on. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t worry,” my mother would say, “it will keep you warm. Just a little added insulation.” She wasn’t even half right.
In the years sinc ...read more
