The smoke has drifted far, all the way to Colorado, Texas and beyond
Wildfire smoke enshrouds large portions of California and Oregon, as seen by NASA’s Aqua satellite on Sunday, July 29, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview)
Since I began this blog in 2013, I’ve seen a lot of satellite imagery of wildfires burning in the American West. Yet despite that experience, I have to admit that when I first saw this image, acquired by NASA’s Aqua sa ...read more
Search for the Rusty Patched bee, track flood impacts, or use your surfboard as a water quality sensor.
Planning a trip to the beach, a park, or a campsite? Here are six ways to contribute to real science while enjoying the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Collect water samples at beaches, bays and ponds to monitor water quality and ensure that beaches are safe for recreation. Whether you’re in Maui or Puerto Rico, there is likel ...read more
Uranus and Neptune, the seventh and eighth planets, are largely a mystery — but that could change within the next two decades.
A study submitted to Arxiv by Amy Simon and Mark Hoffstadter, NASA veterans and experts on those planets, and Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, outlines a cost-effective plan to explore those planets — and maybe even visit a few new places on the way out.
The paper, the end result of a working group ...read more
A satellite was watching as the blaze expanded by half the size of San Francisco and began its deadly rampage into a California city
An animation of satellite images shows a giant cloud erupting from California’s Carr Fire late in the afternoon of July 26, 2018. (Note: If the animation does not load after you click on the screenshot, make sure to hit ‘play’ in the upper left corner of the animation website. If there is a delay, try refresh ...read more
Do you live in Mexico, the United States, or Canada? Then starting tomorrow, you can join in the second International Monarch Monitoring Blitz. From July 28 to August 5, it’s time for #MissionMonarch.
By joining in on the Blitz, you help identify the monarch butterfly’s breeding sites, a task essential to its survival. You can do this by monitoring milkweed and monarch eggs, as well as by taking note of caterpillars, pupae and adults.
Though monarch butter ...read more
A section of the Gorgan Wall in the hills. (Credit: Arman Ershadi)
Golestan Province in Northern Iran is a unique landscape. Sandwiched between the temperate forests of the Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, a narrow corridor connects Persia with the desert steppes of Central Asia. The passage measures 120 miles across from sea to mountain, and it’s made of fertile rolling plains rising to windswept hills. The ancient name for this place was Gorgan (گ&Os ...read more
Satellite image of green vortex swirling in the Gulf of Finland on July 18. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory)
I hope you’ll excuse the exaggerated exuberance in the headline, but when I saw the image above, and then the animation lower down in this story, my first reaction really was to exclaim out loud “whoa!�
I was really struck by the two very curious whirlpool-like features on opposite sides of Earth — one giga ...read more
A California two-spot octopus. (Credit: Greg Amptman/Shutterstock)
A neuroscientist and a marine biologist got together and decided to give octopuses MDMA. It sounds like a joke, but it really happened, and the results reveal something unique about our neurocircuitry and human evolution.
Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this ...read more
(Credit: mimagephotography/shutterstock)
Seeing a smile can make a person unconsciously smile in return, and now scientists find that digitally mimicking the voice of a smiling person can also make people reflexively smile.
Charles Darwin and his contemporaries were among the first scientists to investigate smiles. Darwin suggested that smiles and several other facial expressions are universal to all humans, rather than unique products of a person’s culture.
â€&oe ...read more
