Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky.
The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, “Mars,” stuck. Renaissance astronomers became fascinated with the planet’s apparent backward movement, the so-called retrograde motion that could only be explained with the Sun, not the Earth, a ...read more
(Credit: pippeeContributor/Shutterstock)
There’s no escaping magnetic fields—they’re all around us. For starters, the Earth itself is like a giant magnet. A spinning ball of liquid iron in our planet’s core generates the vast magnetic field that moves our compass needles around and directs the internal compasses of migrating birds, bats, and other animals. On top of that, ever-industrious humans have produced artificial magnetic fields with power lines, transport system ...read more
Photo: flickr/Caden Crawford
Google Trends has become a productive source of data for social scientists, particularly those interested in when and where people search for the word “porn”. First, they discovered that porn searches peaked in winter and early summer, a result that lead them to believe that there actually is a human mating season. Now, they’ve looked at the results by state, and found some more interesting patterns.
Perhaps not surprisingly, &ldquo ...read more
With the eruption at Kīlauea dominating the news, I thought it important to highlight the other developing volcanic crisis that is happening right now. Check out that news after we catch up on what's going on in Hawai'i.
Kīlauea
UAS flight of Kīlauea Volcano's Lower East Rift Zone during the overnight hours of May 22, 2018, captures activity at the fissure complex and lava flows that extend to the ocean; helps scientists assess hazards. https://t.co/a5Bv42SxyE pic.twitter.com ...read more
By Nina Friedman
Learn, collaborate, and share your citizen science project tools at CitSciBio.org!
Back in 2012, Dr. Jennifer Couch and her colleagues at the National Institute of Health realized there was something missing in the greater biomedical citizen science community. The community did not have its own online collaboration platform.
Couch approached Katrina Theisz, a program analyst at NIH, and together they formed a working group. After a series of workshops exploring how ci ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
