A black hole isn't an easy thing to photograph. The famously inscrutable objects are so dense that even light can’t escape their vicinity. By definition, they are invisible. So when the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of a black hole, but what they really released is an image of the black hole’s event horizon — the minimum distance from the black hole’s center where gravity is still weak enough for light to escape.
And how they imaged the super ...read more
Trying to take a picture of a black hole — an object that is, by definition, invisible—sounds like an exercise in futility. But for decades, theoreticians suspected it may just be possible to get a detailed view of a black hole’s perimeter, right up to the edge of the event horizon, the fabled point of no return. And a core group of astronomers spent years trying to turn that prediction into reality. Now, they finally have.
Astronomers announced Wednesday that they’d cap ...read more
Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid struck off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing 75 percent of life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The space rock left a roughly 100-mile-wide crater and destroyed global ecosystems. Now, a new study shows that it took more than 10 million years of evolution before biodiversity recovered.
And the scientists behind the study say their find carries a grave warning for our current era of human-caused extinction, d ...read more
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will launch on its first commercial flight tomorrow. The rocket launch was postponed from early April due to unspecified concerns, and then postponed again just this week due to weather. But Wednesday has a clear forecast with an 80% probability of a launch, so odds are good the mission will proceed. The launch window opens at 6:35am EDT.
Falcon Heavy is a modified version of SpaceX’s standard Falcon 9 rocket, essentially made up of three Falcon 9’s strap ...read more
There are so many ways to engage in Citizen Science Day on April 13. Participate in any SciStarter affiliate project to earn a personalized certificate.
Start with the Stall Catchers Megathon, a gamified, online inter-generational game to accelerate research on Alzheimer's!
Join the virtual SciStarter Megathon team or organize or join an in-person Megathon meet-up. Find all you need on CitizenScienceDay.org .
Citizen Science Day and the Stall Catchers Megath ...read more
One of the great challenges in searching for life on other planets is that we still have so much to learn about life on our own Earth. Amazingly, that is true not only at the micro level of biochemistry and genetic codes, but at the macro level as well. You would think that there would be little left to learn about elephants, bears, penguins, and jaguars--the creatures sometimes lumped together by jaded zoologists as "charismatic megafauna"--but you would be wrong.
The new series "Hostile ...read more
I don’t mean to alarm you, but the average human brain size is shrinking. And we can’t blame reality T.V. or twitter. No, this decline began tens of thousands of years ago.
It’s something of a well-known secret among anthropologists: Based on measurements of skulls, the average brain volume of Homo sapiens has reportedly decreased by roughly 10 percent in the past 40,000 years. This reduction is a reversal of the trend of cranial expansion, which had been occurring in hum ...read more
Baseball is back, and fans can anticipate another season of amazing catches, overpowering pitching, tape-measure home runs – and, yes, controversial calls that lead to blow-ups between umpires and players.
Home plate umpires are at the heart of baseball; every single pitch can require a judgment call. Yet ask any fan or player, and they’ll tell you that many of these calls are incorrect – errors that can affect strategy, statistics and even game outcomes.
Just how many mistak ...read more
It’s not just you. As you age, it gets harder to remember the digits of a phone number, or calculate how much tip to leave without resorting to an app. Our so-called "working memory" is responsible for keeping this kind of information at the forefront of the mind. And it fades with age.
Now researchers have found that stimulating the brain with weak electrical currents can restore working memory in older adults. The discovery lays the groundwork for combating memo ...read more
