(Inside Science) -- Most of us are familiar with the screeching noise packing tape makes when it's peeled off a box, as well as the frustration of failing to cleanly remove a label from a new purchase. It turns out that the jerky stop-and-go motion we experience when peeling tape occurs at a microscopic level as well. Scientists exploring the physics of peeling tape have observed that tape detaches from a surface in a series of tiny lines perpendicular to the peeling direction that can tr ...read more

Troels Schönfeldt can trace his path to becoming a nuclear energy entrepreneur back to 2009, when he and other young physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen started getting together for an occasional “beer and nuclear” meetup. The beer was an India pale ale that they brewed themselves in an old, junk-filled lab space in the institute’s basement. The “nuclear” part was usually a bull session about their options for fighting two of humanity’s ...read more

If you find yourself getting used to strangely scorching or abnormally frigid temperatures, you might not be alone. After combing through over two billion tweets about the weather, a team of researchers found that people seem to get used to abnormal weather pretty quickly. They found that users were less likely to post about unusually high or low temperatures if the same weather conditions had been seen in the past few years.  Peoples’ idea of “normal” weat ...read more

Stratocumulus clouds spread out like puffy cotton balls in orderly rows above the ocean in the sub-tropics. The low-hovering clouds provide the planet shade and help keep Earth cool. But in a new study published this week, researchers say that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could wipe out these clouds. The discovery means that, under “business as usual” emissions scenarios, Earth could heat up 14 degrees Fahrenheit within a century. “We are perturbing a complex ...read more

Bears with diets that are based largely on human food are hibernating less, which is causing them to age quicker biologically, according to a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports. A research team tracked 30 black bears near Durango, Colo., between 2011 and 2015, paying close attention to their eating and hibernation habits. The researchers found that bears who foraged on human food hibernated less during the winters — sometimes, by as much as 50 days — than bea ...read more

In early 2018, Scistarter and Arizona State University began the process of collaborating with a local community, Boulder Ridge, to measure the quality of its air. Boulder Ridge is a 55 and older retirement community in Phoenix. Over the past three years, Boulder Ridge residents began to notice increased blasting, crushing, and trucking out of rock and dirt from an open stone mine next door operated by Southwest Rock Products, LLC. On days when there were no blasts or trucks, the residents ...read more

What a bee! Lost to the science since 1981, the world’s largest bee (Megachile pluto) has been rediscovered on an island in Indonesia. Its non-scientific name is Wallace’s giant bee, named for British entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection … and giant it is! With a 2.5 inch wingspan, this beast of a bee towers over its more familiar brethren. The female is pictured here — males of the species are smaller, someth ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Lemons are known for their face-puckering sour taste. Now scientists have uncovered the mysterious genes behind this acidity, new findings that could help farmers breed sweeter oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit and other citrus fruit. The oldest known reference to citruses dates back to roughly 2200 B.C., when tributes of mandarins and pomelos wrapped in ornamental silks were presented to the imperial court of Yu the Great in China. More citruses are now ...read more

(Inside Science) -- According to Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, at the Southern District of New York, "Forensic science continues to be routinely admitted by the courts, both state and federal, even though considerable doubts have now been raised as to whether forensic science really is science at all, and whether it is reliable and valid.” As part of the National Commission on Forensic Science, Rakoff contributed to a 2016 report noting some serious flaws in the way the justice s ...read more

In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda. Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would sn ...read more