It can be hard to say "thank you." Shyness, stubbornness and the fear of opening ourselves up to another can strangle those two words to silence in our mouths.
Gratitude is especially hard to convey when you're trying to thank a famous broadcaster for starting you on your scientific journey. At the core of most of these species we've featured, these "Attenboroughs," is a humble message of thanks, given in the best way a researcher knows how.
Attenborough's hawkweed, Hieracium attenbo ...read more
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