Three paraplegic patients can walk again thanks to an intense rehabilitation program with a device that sent electricity down his spine, researchers report Monday in two separate studies.
A snowmobile accident nearly 4 years earlier had paralyzed the then 26-year-old Jered Chinnock from the middle of his back down. He couldn't move or feel anything below his sixth thoracic vertebrae — a spinal segment in the middle of the rib cage — where he had broken his back. Now, he can volunta ...read more
Put Artificial Intelligence to work for you in these five projects.
Need a little help identifying that mysterious bug you found? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help! AI is transforming how citizen science gets done: from IDing species to crunching through massive amounts of data.
Still…AI is only part of the solution. Your help is needed to advance scientific research. Let’s get started with our editors’ picks of the week!
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
iNaturalist
Sha ...read more
If only we could regrow our broken bones like Harry Potter, Skele-gro style. Or, at the very least, heal up like a limb-regenerating newt. Alas, we humans possess no such abilities. Though our bodies can mend broken bones, the older we get, the shoddier that patch job gets. As for cartilage — the crucial cushioning that keeps our bones from rubbing together — once that’s gone, it’s gone for good.
But a new discovery by researchers could change that outlook. A team from S ...read more
Neanderthals had bigger brains than people today.
In any textbook on human evolution, you’ll find that fact, often accompanied by measurements of endocranial volume, the space inside a skull. On average, this value is about 1410 cm3 (~6 cups) for Neanderthals and 1350 cm3 (5.7 cups) for recent humans.
So does that quarter-cup of brain matter, matter? Were Neanderthals smarter than our kind?
While brain size is important, cognitive abilities are influenced by numerous factors includi ...read more
Hana Raza has never seen a Persian leopard. But thanks to her, we know the big cats still roam the Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan. After four decades of war in Iraq, the species was thought to have followed the Asiatic lion and cheetah into local extinction. But Raza says she never lost hope. “It’s a very adaptive creature,” she says. “And I just thought, it’s too strong. It can survive the wars.” With a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in biology, she jo ...read more
Dark matter research is unsettling. Scientists were unnerved when they first noticed that galaxies don't rotate by the same physics as a spinning plate. The stars at a galaxy's edge rotate faster than expected. And their motion can only be explained by a lot of invisible matter that we can't see.
That was exciting more than unsettling when the field was new and ideas were plentiful and had yet to be proven wrong. Researchers consolidated the possibilities into two main camps, complete wit ...read more
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched April 18, headed for an orbit that takes it out to about the distance of the Moon at its apogee. Just a few weeks later, it began science operations and a list of 50 exoplanet candidates rolled in, with researchers now expecting at least six of those first candidates to be eventually confirmed as bona-fide planets.
The above image represents TESS’ “first light” science image, starting in the first of 26 sectors ...read more
