Image Credit: Pixabay This fall, students everywhere were treated to a citizen science virtual field trip organized by Discovery Education and the Girl Scouts of the USA. “Unleash Your Inner Scientist,” the title of virtual field trip,  featured SciStarter’s Founder, Darlene Cavalier, and was filmed on location at the 92-acre STEM Center of Excellence in Dallas, Texas. No worries if you missed it when it originally aired because the full-length virtual field trip video ...read more

A health worker administrates polio-vaccine drops to a child during an anti-polio immunization campaign on March 09, 2017 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. (Credit: Asianet-Pakistan/Shutterstock) Polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 people each year worldwide. Today, vaccines have dropped the number of reported cases to just 407 in 2013, according to the CDC. But the disease still lurks in developing countries because vaccine storage and transport requires refrigeration. Now, scientists find freeze-d ...read more

MarCO-B took this image of Mars from about 4,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away during its flyby of the planet on Nov. 26, 2018. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Groundbreaking CubeSats Yesterday, NASA’s InSight lander touched down successfully on the martian surface in a flawless feat of engineering. Two briefcase-sized satellites known as CubeSats followed the exploratory probe all the way from Earth to the Red Planet. These twin Cubesats are the first of their kind to ever travel to ano ...read more

The fiery behavior of a star can be observed as sound waves. A pair of astronomers has built an AI network to better study stars using these sound waves. (Credit: NASA) Star Sound Waves Using artificial intelligence (AI) and sound waves, researchers have found a possible means of looking inside stars. It’s based on the fact that stars aren’t solid objects — far from it, in fact. They’re intense, vibrating balls of plasma held together by their own gravity and with ...read more

Planet Nine could be lurking in the outer solar system, or it could join the ranks of other discredited planets. (Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) In 2016, astronomers announced there was a new planet in the outer solar system. Planet Nine, supposedly larger than Neptune and located far beyond the orbits of the planets known so far, is a particular mystery since no one has yet observed it. Scientists have merely tracked its supposed orbit by watching the gravitational pull th ...read more

Insight’s first image of Mars. NASA. NASA’s InSight lander reached Mars yesterday. It’s the seventh successful landed mission, and it’s the latest in our continuous presence on the red planet since 1997. Yup, we’ve had a rover or a lander doing science on Mars non stop for over 20 years! But landers like InSight don’t get enough love. They seem less exciting than their roving cousins, but these stationary missions have done some really incredible science. Reg ...read more

(Credit: Daniel Eskridge/Shutterstock) One day, about 11,000 years ago, a lone bull mastodon plodded through the shallows of a lake in what today is Michigan. Some time later, three females and a gamboling calf passed the same way. Luckily for paleontologists, clay-rich mud filled the animals’ footprints, preserving the tracks and giving scientists insights into the mastodons’ social structure. The long-extinct creatures likely lived in matriarchal herds, while mature males roamed ...read more

While lightning can, in fact, strike the same place twice, if it strikes enough sand, it can create glass. That process — turning something into glass — is called vitrification. In this case, the sand heats up and liquefies, then rapidly cools into a glasslike state. Vitrification pops up all over, beyond traditional glass. Fertility experts use extreme cooling to vitrify immature human eggs and embryos, better preserving them. We also vitrify some radioactive waste for safe storage ...read more

Experts have known for a while that gas and dark matter — the theoretical counterpart to regular matter — sprawl through the cosmos. These so-called cosmic webs account for the bulk of the matter in the great unknown. Generally, where there’s plenty of gas, there are also plenty of galaxies, which give off ultraviolet (UV) light). Today, that UV light keeps most of that gas transparent, and galaxies shine through. But in our universe’s youth — around 12.5 billion ye ...read more