People become less approving of social media outrage the more people join in with it. One person rebuking another is fine, but ten people doing it looks like a mob.
This is the key finding of an interesting new paper called The Paradox of Viral Outrage, from Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford.
According to the authors, the titular ‘paradox’ is that “individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by ...read more
A new preprint called “A systematic bias in DTI findings” could prove worrying for many neuroscientists. In the article, authors Farshid Sepehrband and colleagues of the University of Southern California argue that commonly-used measures of the brain’s white matter integrity may be flawed, and that this may have led to false
The technique in question, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), uses an MRI scanner to measure the diffusion of water molecules at different points in the brai ...read more
Here are our picks of the week for educators and learners (and, really, aren’t we all life-long learners?). Each project includes lesson plans aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.
Ooooooh! The school bell is about to ring. Here’s to a great year of learning and contributing to science.
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Students Discover
Students Discover offers projects about that are sure to ignite students’ interest in science. With lesson plans and hands-on activit ...read more
Here there be water! The maps show the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south (left) and north (right) poles. (Credit: NASA)
There’s water on the Moon.
Twenty years ago, evidence of frost-coated regions near the Moon’s poles was greeted with surprise and skepticism. Ten years ago, a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 space probe greatly boosted the case for water ice on the Moon. Then two weeks ago, a much deeper analysis of the Chandrayaan-1 data val ...read more
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/ Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran)
Jupiter is without a doubt inhospitable, but it does have one thing going for it — increasing evidence that it’s rich in water.
Astrophysicist Gordon L. Bjoraker of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently published a paper in the Astronomical Journal, outlining how he and his team of researchers detected signatures of water emitting from Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. By studying the gian ...read more
Captured: approximately 15,000 galaxies (12,000 of which are star-forming) widely distributed in time and space. (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales))
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
Astronomers are engaged in a lively debate over plans to rename one of the laws of physics.
It emerged overnight in Vienna at the 30th Meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), in Vienna, where members of ...read more
SciStarter, the Citizen Science Association, and the Citizen Science Day Working Group are excited to announce Citizen Science Day on Saturday, April 13, 2019! The fourth annual Citizen Science Day celebrates and raises awareness about the amazing volunteers, projects, and scientific breakthroughs that are part of citizen science, encourages new people to get involved, and connects people to local events.
All organizations interested in citizen science, including museums, aquariums, nature cent ...read more
My very first blog post was September 2008. A lot has changed since then—I started and completed a PhD program at the University of Hawaii (where I met my partner and now baby-daddy), did a post-doc, wrote one book (that you should really read—just ask Amazon or Smithsonian) and edited another (on science blogging!), and started a new full-time editing job with the YouTube science channel SciShow. And over those ten years, I have written& ...read more
Photo: Flickr/Mark Berry
[Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. En ...read more
(Credit: kunmom/shutterstock)
Once upon a time, Earth was colder, locked in its latest ice age. Eventually, roughly 14,000 years ago, things started thawing and the planet warmed back up. But that climate change, according to a new paper in Science, caused a major shift in vegetation. And if we don’t curb our fossil fuel use and cut carbon emissions soon, the authors say, we’ll see another big shift in plant life within 100 to 150 years.
Ancient Global Warming
An international tea ...read more
