(Credit: Ruslan Kokarev/shutterstock) A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. When those first fat drops of summer rain fall to the hot, dry ground, have you ever noticed a distinctive odor? I have childhood memories of family members who were farmers describing how they could always “smell rain” right before a storm. Of course rain itself has no scent. But moments before a rain event, an “earthy” smell known as petrichor does permeate th ...read more

Credit:NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona If you think your commute is bad, try traveling over a billion miles to get to work. After almost two years of space travel, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft finally has a clear view of its jobsite — a near-Earth, carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu. The craft’s PolyCam camera captured its first image of Bennu on August 17 from a distance just 1.4 millio ...read more

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University) Robots made of … paper? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have developed a pretty neat way to bring plain old paper to life. The team used an inexpensive 3D printer to apply a thin layer of conducting thermoplastic, a material that becomes pliable when warm, but regains its original, hardened shape when cool. When the researchers apply an electrical current, the melting thermoplastic makes the paper bend ...read more

Editor’s Note: You got to know Dan with his team member spotlight. Now you can read about his perspective on and work with libraries!  By Dan Stanton  If you haven’t visited your local public library in a while or if you just pop in from time to time, I highly recommend you take some time to look around and really take in what is going on: Take a walk around the building: you are likely to see a maker space, a seed library, or a teen area hosting a coding club (&ldquo ...read more

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft captured this animation of a solar prominence on August 13, 2018. (Source: NASA) In my ongoing hunt for cool imagery to feature here at ImaGeo, I regularly check to see what NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft has been seeing on the Sun. The animation above is one of SDO’s more recent captures. It shows an eruption of material rising up along invisible magnetic field lines, twisting, and then falling back down, a ...read more

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