As with our planet as a whole, if you want to know the fate of polar bears in a warming world, you need to follow the energy. For the planet, researchers have been doing just that by keeping track of how carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere have been tipping the climate's energy balance toward more and more warming. And the high north where polar bears live has warmed faster than any other region on Earth, resulting in shrinking sea ice and a cascade o ...read more

It can be hard to say "thank you." Shyness, stubbornness and the fear of opening ourselves up to another can strangle those two words to silence in our mouths. Gratitude is especially hard to convey when you're trying to thank a famous broadcaster for starting you on your scientific journey. At the core of most of these species we've featured, these "Attenboroughs," is a humble message of thanks, given in the best way a researcher knows how. Attenborough's hawkweed, Hieracium attenbo ...read more

Airbus first announced its plans to create a self-flying taxi service in 2016. On Jan. 31, after two years of planning and building, it proved it isn’t just a pipedream — the Vahana successfully completed its first flight test. The full-scale aircraft flew fully autonomously for 53 seconds at an altitude of 16 feet (gotta start somewhere) at its testing grounds in Pendleton, Oregon. It conducted another flight the following day, which seems to have gone well, too. The FAA was in att ...read more

Woodpecker brains preserved in ethanol feel a bit like modeling clay. That’s according to George Farah, a graduate student at Boston University School of Medicine who scooped the brains out of downy woodpecker specimens stored at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. “Some were like angel food cake, it’s together but can easily be broken; it can easily fracture,” says Farah. “I have a lot of experience with preserved brains.” Farah, along with his ...read more

If you know any scientists, you'll know they are often pretty bad about procrastination. How bad? Well, according to this author, a program director at the NSF, grant submissions right before a deadline are predictable enough to be defined by a mathematical function (we wonder what dreaded task he was putting off by graphing this). It turns out that the rapid increase in submissions in the days leading up to the deadline actually follow a modified hyperbolic function (se ...read more

When the Philadelphia Eagles face the New England Patriots on Sunday, look for the brains on the sidelines. A combined THIRTY Super Bowl cheerleaders are currently pursuing careers in STEM. Fifteen on the Patriots side and fifteen on the Eagles side. Below, two former cheerleaders share their picks for Citizen Science on Super Bowl Sunday! Cheers! The SciStarter Team Allison, a former Eagles cheerleader with degrees in Biology and Chemistry, recommen ...read more

We’ve all been there: You’re already running late on some hectic morning, only to realize you’ve lost — sorry, misplaced — your keys. Or you realize moments before the big date you can’t find your favorite sweater. It happens to all of us; even NASA has lost whole satellites before. But earlier this week, NASA confirmed the remarkable news that one of its lost satellites, the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE), had been found. And as ...read more

The recent allegations that researchers funded by the German car industry tested the effects of diesel fumes on humans and monkeys has raised serious questions about research ethics in the corporate world. These tests were carried out by scientists on behalf of the now-disbanded European Research Group of Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), which was funded by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. The aim was to observe and record the pollutant effect of emissions from diesel cars ...read more

Picture yourself on a tropical beach. You’re walking barefoot on the sand, hand-in-hand with someone you love. But trouble may be lurking underfoot, and one Canadian couple stepped right into it. After getting back from vacation in the Dominican Republic, a couple had really itchy feet. At first, they figured they had bug bites and itched away, hoping the sensations would eventually go away. Then it got worse as each day passed. They eventually went to get their feet checked out ...read more

A new study on stone tools from a site in India offers the latest challenge to the model of human evolution and migration that has dominated paleoanthropology, particularly in the West, for decades. The artifacts, which the researchers say were produced with a sophisticated style of tool-making, are hundreds of thousands of years older than might be expected. What does it mean? Well, that part of the story is still up for debate. At the archaeological site of Attirampa ...read more