By Sharon Karasick
Girl Scouts are encouraged to try all sorts of new things in their scouting experience, a commitment reflected in their new motto: ”When she’s a Girl Scout, she’s also a G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader)™. While many troops still embrace the traditional three c’s of crafts, camping, and cookies, Girl Scouts are also exploring new civic engagement opportunities through innovative STEM programming.
On the surface, civic engag ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
“Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?” so sayeth Indiana Jones, and so, apparently, say babies too.
In a study published Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychology, European neuroscientists determined that our instinctive fears of snakes and spiders are so primal, even babies become alarmed at the sight of them. How’d they figured it out? Well, they scared some babies. For science! [embedded content]Primal Fear
Though not everyone is frightened of the tw ...read more
In November 2013, a four-year-old captive beluga whale moved to a new home. She had been living in a facility with other belugas. But in her new pool, the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, her only companions were dolphins. The whale adapted quickly: she started imitating the unique whistles of the dolphins, and stopped making a signature beluga call altogether.
“The first appearance of the beluga in the dolphinarium caused a fright in the dolphins,” write Elena ...read more
Anthropologist Teresea Fernandez-Crespo examined megaliths, or stone burial sites, in north-central Spain to learn more about how farmers lived in the Late Neolithic. (Teresea Fernandez-Crespo)
We’ve heard how great times used to be, and I don’t mean in 1950s America.
For eons, our hunter-gatherer ancestors shared their spoils with one another, didn’t own much and had very little social hierarchy. Sure, it wasn’t all kumbaya and high-fives. But the fact that individuals ...read more
A New Zealand tui (Credit: Auckland Photo News)
Birds are territorial creatures, and they’ll passionately defend their chosen area from unwanted intrusions. For some songbirds, it doesn’t even take a physical breach to draw their ire — if you’re a lovely singer, they’ll attack.
New Zealand’s tui songbirds certainly aren’t doing the “jealous performer” stereotype any good. Males of the species will fend off rival males encroac ...read more
Back in May I discussed a paper published in PNAS which, I claimed, was using scientific terminology in a sloppy way. The authors, Pearce et al., used the word “neuropeptides” to refer to six molecules, but three of them weren’t neuropeptides at all. The authors acknowledged this minor error and issued a correction.
Now, it emerges that there may be more serious problems with the PNAS paper. In a letter published last week, researchers Patrick Jern and colleagues say that the ...read more
A pit on the moon’s surface. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
Turn-of-the-century science fiction posited the existence of aliens living deep within the surface of the moon.
Someday, those subterranean creatures could very well be us.
New data from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has uncovered a 30-mile-long cave under the moon’s surface, likely the relic of lava flows on the surface. Though the existence of lava tubes isn’t something new, th ...read more
