Asteroids like Psyche 16, thought to be the core of a vanished planet, could be worth trillions. (Credit: Maxar/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
What if the key to protecting our planet … was leaving it? Well, in part, at least. As worries about climate change mount, and the race to obtain resources from space heats up, some experts and über-rich CEOs are seriously considering moving our industry off-planet. That means using robots to build satellites and space stations by mining as ...read more
Private spaceflight companies will carry commercial payloads to the Moon in advance of NASA’s crewed landing slated for 2024. (Credit: NASA)
NASA wants to return humans to the Moon by 2024 under a program called Artemis. And this time, they want the stay to be of a more permanent nature. In addition to landing humans on the lunar surface, NASA wants to put a Gateway space station in orbit around the moon, to host the next generation of space experiments and to serve as a waystation betw ...read more
(Credit: Sergey Uryadnikov/Shutterstock)
Within the rainforests of Salonga National Park, in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bonobos wade through swamps. The slender, three-and-a-half-foot tall apes are searching for rushes and white water lilies. They pluck the herbs from the water and then discard the flowers and leaves. The bonobos are after the soft pith at the base of the leaves and other parts of the plants that grow underwater.
Now researchers find the aquatic h ...read more
This summer, whether you're at home, fishing on a lake, or walking along the beach, consider getting involved in one or more of the citizen science projects featured below. Each one empowers us to keep an eye on the health of our water sources.
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Stream Selfie
More than one-third of us drink water that runs through streams. But how clean are those streams? To find out, we first need to know where they are. Share a picture of your local s ...read more
The crew capsule and its launch abort safety system lifted off on time from Cape Canaveral. (Credit: NASA)
On Tuesday morning at 7am EDT, NASA successfully completed the final major flight test for their Orion crew capsule. This is the new craft NASA will use to transport humans to the Moon and Mars as a new age of space exploration begins.
The Artemis Moon mission is slated to begin next year with an uncrewed flight to the Moon. With this final flight test cleared, that should be the ne ...read more
A highly acclaimed neuroscientist whose work offered hope for many patients with brain injury has fallen from grace.
Niels Birbaumer. From https://www.wysscenter.ch/person/niels-birbaumer-phd/
Prof. Niels Birbaumer, of the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, came under investigation earlier this year. The probe began after researcher Martin Spüler raised serious concerns over a 2017 paper in PLoS Biology by Ujwal Chaudhary et al. Birbaumer was the senior author.
...read more
(Credit: Erin McGrady/Shutterstock)
(Inside Science) -- Big, black wasplike things living in your toilet may sound more like a horror scene than a sanitation solution. That's certainly what people in rural Louisiana thought in the summer of 1930, when black soldier flies infested a set of newly installed privies.
"[C]onsiderable consternation often resulted when a person lifted a privy lid and was greeted by a swarm of insects resembling wasps, or when upon leaving the privy he experience ...read more
The launch abort system for NASA's Orion crew capsule will undergo its final test on Tuesday. (Credit: NASA)
NASA has big plans for human spaceflight, aiming to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, a mission they're calling Artemis. To carry those astronauts, NASA has been developing the new Orion crew capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket powerful enough to launch beyond low-Earth orbit.
On Tuesday morning, NASA will test the launch abort safety system for ...read more
The diamond ring phase over Newberry, South Carolina, during the total solar eclipse August 21, 2017. (Credit: Michael Roudabush/Wikimedia Commons)
Tuesday, July 2, will bring a special kind of darkness to South America. In certain parts of Chile and Argentina, people will find a strange twilight falling as the Moon inches across and ultimately covers the Sun’s disk completely in a total solar eclipse lasting just over two minutes for most observers.
For those lucky people in the pat ...read more
The nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 has a system of seven Earth-size planets, all jammed into a space much smaller than the gap between the Sun and Mercury. (Credit: ESO/O. Furtak)
When I was an astronomy-obsessed kid, I learned that most of the stars in our galaxy and beyond are very similar to our Sun. No less an authority than Carl Sagan wrote that "the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star." If that insight diminished the importance of our place in the universe, it also made it seem ...read more
