Upper jaw bone and tusks of a walrus used in the study. It can be dated to c.1200-1400 A.D. based on the characteristics of a runic inscription in Old Norse.(Credit: Musées du Mans) The disappearance of Norse colonists from Greenland is somewhat of a mystery. Norse settlers colonized Greenland during the Viking Age in the late 900s and lived there for several centuries before their colonies declined in the 1300s and 1400s A.D. Climate change could have driven the Greenland Norse to aban ...read more

While shooting the setting Moon from Pensacola Beach, Florida, this photographer captured what he describes as “probably the luckiest shot of my life” on August 2, 2017, at 2 a.m. EDT. He used a Nikon D90 with an 18mm lens at f/3.5 to take a 15-second exposure at ISO 2500. (Credit: Austin House) Call your friends. It’s time once again for the annual Perseid meteor shower, typically the greatest shower of the year. This event occurs during the Northern Hemisphere summer, so ev ...read more

On August 1, 2, and 3, MIT Media Lab and several other sponsors hosted the first iteration of the annual Connected Learning Summit. I attended this conference to supporter my SciStarter colleague, Lea Shell,who absolutely ROCKED her “ignite” talk at the close of the conference.  But as I attended each successive day of the conference, I also fell in love with principles of connected learning and became deeply impressed with the thoughtfulness of conferen ...read more

Jupiter’s moons put out “whistler” radio waves. Future spacecraft could help unravel their cause. (Credit: ESA/NASA, Artist M. Carroll) Jupiter’s moons “hum” — and researchers are trying to figure out why. New research published Tuesday in Nature Communications details the discovery of “whistler” radio waves coming from two of the moons: Ganymede and Europa. The other two large moons, Io and Callisto, aren’t subject to this phenomena. ...read more

The ELaNa IV launch, containing 11 Cubesat missions, on November 19 , 2013. (Credit: NASA) In the vastness of space, unfathomable size is generally the norm. But when Jordi Puig-Suari, an aerospace engineering professor, began looking at the stars, he started thinking small. Together with Bob Twiggs, a professor at Stanford University, they developed the CubeSat, a tissue box-sized satellite that has intensified interest in space and revolutionized satellite communication. When Puig-Suari work ...read more

Astronomers watched a dying star, dubbed HuBi 1, get a brief second lease on life. (Credit: Nature Astronomy (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0551-8) Often when stars die, they go out with a bang in the form of a supernova, leaving a small, dim stellar corpse in the center of a gaseous nebula. But sometimes, these leftover stars can get a new spark of life. Astronomers used a telescope in the Canary Islands to watch a dying star, dubbed HuBi 1, get a brief second wind. And as they observed, the ...read more

(Credit: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock) Male doctors, you’re doing great, but you may want to take some notes from your female colleagues. That’s because more and more studies are coming to the same conclusion: Female doctors produce better outcomes than men. Back in 2016, Harvard researchers showed that elderly patients treated by female doctors were less likely to die or return to the hospital than if they were treated by a man. They extrapolated their findings a bit, and conclude ...read more

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In a slightly depressing new paper, two researchers describe how they tried to get access to the data behind 111 of the most cited psychology and psychiatry papers published in the past decade. The researchers, Tom E. Hardwicke and John P. A. Ioannidis of Stanford, wanted to place the data into a ‘Data Ark‘ to ensure its continued preservation for science. Unfortunately, in most cases, the data was not made available. The paper is called Populating the Data Ark and it’s out no ...read more