(Credit: yuRomanovich/Shutterstock) By now, we’re all tired of hearing about the virtual currency turned investment craze known as Bitcoin. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, anarcho-capitalists hailed it as the decentralized future of commerce. But as prices soared and the biggest names on Wall Street bought in, Bitcoin became mostly known as a speculative, unregulated investment. Think Beanie Babies, but you can also use them to buy drugs and engage in human trafficking. ...read more

The ash and steam plume from Kilauea’s Halema’uma’u caldera at the summit, seen on May 15, 2018. Image: USGS/HVO. It seems like every day since the Leilani Estates eruption began, Kilauea has thrown something new at the people of Hawaii.  The new fissure 17 that opened over the weekend has produced a lava flow that has traveled more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles). However, the news today now comes from the summit of Kilauea in the Halema’uma’u caldera, where the ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Many stories about drones are sensationalized. It’s easy to use broad language that gives the impression that drones will soon be zooming over us delivering goods. That’s not true. Now that I’ve beaten down your dreams, let me build you up just a little bit. A new program in the United States could actually lead to a life where drones drop medicine at your doorstep and are border patrol agents. Just not in the next year or two, or three, for that ma ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Phone apps often get a bad rap for being distracting time-wasters (I’m looking at you, Reddit), but some seek to challenge the minds of their users and put the resulting data to good use. And maybe even invent a new language in the process. The Color Game app uses colors and symbols to study the evolution of language. Created by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the app is looking to uncover clues to an age-ol ...read more

(Credit: Sofi photo/Shutterstock) Sometimes, what’s not there can be just as important as what is. Jazz is famously all about the notes you don’t play, and Sherlock Holmes once solved a crime because of a dog that didn’t bark. Scientists wanted to get in on that, so a paper appearing today in PNAS. takes a look at the sounds we don’t say — or, at least, don’t say as readily — with nouns winning out as the biggest obstacles to quick, unobstructed s ...read more

A sea slug. (Credit: Zuzha/Shutterstock) Sea slugs aren’t the most exciting critters, but they’re certainly helping researchers make exciting new discoveries. Biologists from the University of California Los Angeles published a study in the journal eNeuro explaining how they “implanted” a memory from one slug into another. In the first chunk of their study, the team, led by David Glanzman, worked with groups of a marine slug called Aplysia. One group of slugs got shocke ...read more

NASA’s Operation IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown An aerial photograph of an iceberg shaped like the Matterhorn floating in Scoresby Sund along Greenland’s eastern coast. The photo was taken during an Operation IceBridge flight on Apr. 21, 2018. (Source: NASA/Joe MacGregor) During my very first visit to the Arctic, the Sun did a lazy 360 above Tromsø, Norway each day. It was summer, and I was simply entranced by the midnight ...read more

Curvature map of a Homo naledi cranial endocast. (Credit PNAS) Maybe size doesn’t matter that much after all. Ever since its discovery in 2013, Homo naledi — the newest addition to our family tree — has been a source of speculation and surprise. The South African hominin’s latest mind-bending revelation: Its brain, though notably small, had several structural details similar to those of bigger-brained members of the genus Homo, including us. The new research hi ...read more

Matt Madd It’s time to focus on what keeps you healthy! We’ve curated a list of citizen science projects working to promote health and wellness around the world. Whether you’re looking at the microbes inside of your gut or tracking your latest run, we’ve got you covered! Cheers! The SciStarter Team Cochrane Crowd Contribute to better healthcare decisions by categorizing research records! Become a Cochrane citizen scientist and work together with collaborators all over t ...read more

Hubble also saw water vapor erupting from Europa, shown here in an artist illustration with real images but enhanced ejecta. (Credit: NASA/ESA/and M. Kornmesser) Score another point for Jupiter’s moon Europa as a top target in the hunt for alien life. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists say they’ve found the best evidence yet that plumes of water erupt from an ocean hidden beneath the moon’s icy shell. The Hubble Space Telescope h ...read more