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

"Hello!" says the human. "Hello!" pipes the orca right back. It's not a children's movie, but an actual orca emitting human(ish) words. An international team of researchers has taught Wikie, a 14 year-old killer whale in France, to mimic certain simple bits of speech, a discovery that gives them insight into wild orca dialects. Repeat After Me In all, Wikie learned six words, in addition to five orca sounds that she didn't know before. The phrases included "hello," "ah ha," "one, two ...read more

Amazon unveiled the newest addition to its Seattle campus today — three glass and concrete domes filled with a jungle's worth of tropical plants. The Spheres, as they're called, are meant to serve as a place for meetings and collaborative work. Communal spaces, many in the shape of nests, are scattered throughout the lush interior. The $4 billion project is a chance for Amazon to flaunt its continued success and wow potential employees, but it could also function as a test of sorts. ...read more

You hear one thing, but the computer hears another. What's going on here? Two researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have exploited the technique computers use to decode human speech to hide messages inside snippets of audio. When translated by a speech recognition program like Mozilla's DeepSpeech, the computer ends up transcribing the hidden message instead of the sounds we hear. Do You Hear What I Hear? The method basically involves hiding a quiet sample of the audio ...read more

Good friends like to think they're on the same wavelength. They aren't wrong. Besties laugh at the same jokes, like the same movies and hate the same people. And underlying all these likes and dislikes, close friends also share strikingly similar neural activity while thinking about them. Researchers at Dartmouth College analyzed brain scans of close friends and found that their brains tend to respond to the world in similar ways. As a next step, researchers want to see if it's possibl ...read more