The Hubble Space Telescope has outdone itself once again. By leveraging multiple deep surveys that peer across the cosmos and back to the first 500 million years after the Big Bang, astronomers have created the deepest, widest portrait yet of the distant universe. Astronomers combined 7,500 exposures containing 265,000 galaxies into one image representing more than 250 days of Hubble observing time. Like other deep surveys, astronomers can use it as a time capsule from the early universe, a ...read more

In 1902, famed fossil hunter Barnum Brown was prospecting in Montana when he discovered the first documented remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The creature was nearly 40 feet long with banana-sized teeth, warranting its name, “king of the tyrant lizards.” Finds since then have only reinforced T. rex’s status as one of the planet’s most ferocious predators ever. We now know that — in a world of large plant-eaters — these hunters didn’t just rely on their en ...read more

Impressionist art, or perhaps nightmare fuel — these images are a confusing mess to the human eye. But to a macaque's brain cells, says a group of researchers, the images are fascinating. The pictures are the result of an experiment that paired artificial intelligence with primate intelligence. The goal was to create images specifically tuned to stimulate neurons in a monkey's visual cortex. It's not an attempt to create monkey-centric art. Instead, the jumbled images might help ...read more

Really, any day is a good day to engage in citizen science. Need some inspiration? “American Spring LIVE,” aired last week on PBS NATURE and it featured lots of citizen science projects in need of your help. Catch the recorded series on Facebook! Cheers, The SciStarter Team Milkweed Tracker This time of year, caterpillar eggs are beginning to hatch. The caterpillars depend on milkweed for food as they grow and evolve into Monarchs. Help researchers track the locations ...read more

The incessant “eep, eep, eep” of hundreds of hungry flamingo chicks bounces off the concrete walls of a feeding room at the SANCCOB wildlife sanctuary in Cape Town, South Africa. Teri Grendzinski reaches into a pen and plucks out a fluffy, pale pink chick. She grips it gently with one hand. The bird opens its mouth eagerly as her syringe squirts out a kind of warm shrimp milkshake. It’s noisy, hot work. To keep the chicks warm away from their nests, their rooms are heated to a ...read more

If you could peer through the 160 miles of noxious clouds driven by hurricane-force winds over Venus, you’d witness a barren landscape strewn with volcanoes, mountains and high plateaus. Scientists have long suspected that these features formed hundreds of millions of years ago. And today, the thinking went, Venus is geologically dead. But now a cascade of new research in is forcing astronomers to reconsider that idea. Explaining Venus’ Young Surface Venus is often called Earth&rsquo ...read more

Between the third and second millennium B.C, trade networks crisscrossed the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe moving amber, a rare and valuable commodity, across the continent. Now researchers say some of that amber was actually clever fakes. They suspect the counterfeit gems may have been used to swindle wealthy buyers. “This is the first time that the imitation of a very valuable material is recorded in European Prehistory,” said Carlos Odriozola, an archaeologist at ...read more

Humans have turned many wild animals into cuddlier creatures. We've domesticated wolves into dogs, boars into barnyard pigs and mountain goats into livestock that do yoga. But in addition to helpful animals and adorable pets, humans may have also domesticated an altogether different creature: Homo sapiens. The so-called self-domestication hypothesis, floated by Charles Darwin and formulated by 21st century scholars, is now popular among anthropologists. They see parallels between changes ...read more

Ah, giant pandas. Aside from their reputation for being, well, not the sharpest crayons in the box, they’re most closely associated with munching almost exclusively on bamboo. But that taste for bamboo has always stumped researchers. First off, other members of the bear family are either carnivorous or at the very least omnivorous. Plus, despite having evolved specific physical traits, like their strong jaws and pseudo-thumbs, to help them eat bamboo, pandas have what’s essentially a ...read more

In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek — and when that happens, other colors flare. The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue an ...read more