Airbus first announced its plans to create a self-flying taxi service in 2016. On Jan. 31, after two years of planning and building, it proved it isn’t just a pipedream — the Vahana successfully completed its first flight test.
The full-scale aircraft flew fully autonomously for 53 seconds at an altitude of 16 feet (gotta start somewhere) at its testing grounds in Pendleton, Oregon. It conducted another flight the following day, which seems to have gone well, too. The FAA was in att ...read more
Woodpecker brains preserved in ethanol feel a bit like modeling clay.
That’s according to George Farah, a graduate student at Boston University School of Medicine who scooped the brains out of downy woodpecker specimens stored at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
“Some were like angel food cake, it’s together but can easily be broken; it can easily fracture,” says Farah. “I have a lot of experience with preserved brains.”
Farah, along with his ...read more
If you know any scientists, you'll know they are often pretty bad about procrastination. How bad? Well, according to this author, a program director at the NSF, grant submissions right before a deadline are predictable enough to be defined by a mathematical function (we wonder what dreaded task he was putting off by graphing this). It turns out that the rapid increase in submissions in the days leading up to the deadline actually follow a modified hyperbolic function (se ...read more
When the Philadelphia Eagles face the New England Patriots on Sunday, look for the brains on the sidelines.
A combined THIRTY Super Bowl cheerleaders are currently pursuing careers in STEM. Fifteen on the Patriots side and fifteen on the Eagles side.
Below, two former cheerleaders share their picks for Citizen Science on Super Bowl Sunday!
Cheers!
The SciStarter Team
Allison, a former Eagles cheerleader with degrees in Biology and Chemistry, recommen ...read more
We’ve all been there: You’re already running late on some hectic morning, only to realize you’ve lost — sorry, misplaced — your keys. Or you realize moments before the big date you can’t find your favorite sweater. It happens to all of us; even NASA has lost whole satellites before.
But earlier this week, NASA confirmed the remarkable news that one of its lost satellites, the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE), had been found. And as ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine