This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. As children head back to school, an increasing number of their homeschooled peers will be starting their academic year as well. Homeschooling in the United States is growing at...

In Blueprint for a Battlestar: Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's Greatest Inventions, NASA insider Rod Pyle explores remarkable and memorable technologies from the world of science fiction. Each concept is explained and dissected to reveal the real science behind it. Some are temptingly within our reach — such as cyborgs...

When you think of cannibals, you may picture the headline-grabbing psychopaths who, every so often, commit horrific crimes. But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, cannibalism might involve a self-sacrificing mother or a hungry fetus snacking down on its siblings. Now, Bill Schutt's Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (Algonquin Books, 2017)...

Join Live Science as we take a seat at the table with Bill Schutt, author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (Algonquin Books, 2018). While cannibalism in animals — including people — has been recognized for centuries, it wasn't always well-studied, and was long-thought to be a type of behavior...

New, lifelike models of newborns that are as squishy as real babies and even include mimics of working organs could help surgeons and nurses train to perform life-saving procedures, researchers say. The baby mimics were created using 3D printing and were designed to better replicate the anatomical complexity and feel...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was asked to give this year's commencement address at Harvard, he asked for advice from Bill Gates. Zuckerberg said, They know we didn't actually...

School lunch programs in the U.S. will no longer be required to meet all of the nutrition standards set in the Obama era, the Trump administration announced this week. The news means that school lunches won't necessarily see the cuts in sodium and boosts in whole grains that were outlined...

Where the bodies are buried (Image credit: The University of Mississippi Medical Center)Built in 1855, the Mississippi State Insane Hospital housed an estimated 35,000 patients over a span of 80 years, until it was shuttered in 1935. Experts suspect that as many as 7,000 of the asylum's former patients are...

If you're shopping for that someone who loves to learn and is just curious about the world, how about a book? Here's a look at some of the best book deals on Amazon this Cyber Monday that are sure to dazzle the science lover in your life. The Sixth Extinction:...

Medical schools have historically used human cadavers to train students in anatomy and medical procedures, a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. However, a unique type of medical model provides a remarkably human alternative to working with preserved corpses. SynDaver synthetic humans are anatomically accurate medical models fabricated by...

Today's college students have more perfectionistic traits than those of decades past, a new study suggests. The study is one of the first to examine generational differences in perfectionism, which is defined as having excessively high standards for oneself and being overly self-critical. In the study, researchers analyzed data from...

It appears that a high school student in Davis, California, baked her grandfather's ashes into sugar cookies and gave them out at school on Oct. 4. Yes, people ate them. And, yes, this is a real news story. It was reported in the Los Angeles Times. Apparently, some of the...

Finding eroded hills (Image credit: Copyright 2019 West Virginia University)West Virginia University geologists Graham Andrews (shown in picture) and Sarah Brown, discovered glacier-eroded hills called drumlins, and their larger counterparts whalebacks and megawhalebacks while journeying through northern Namibia. Measuring the structures (Image credit: Copyright 2019 West Virginia University)West Virginia University...

NEW YORK — Have you ever wondered how to predict the weather, land an airplane onto a moving train, or knock a drone out of the sky with sports equipment? Randall Munroe, creator of the popular science webcomic xkcd, has a new book that presents outrageous solutions for a broad...

Two grinning men pose for a video camera in front of a helicopter: We're going on a tour, one of them says and laughs. But what they were about to do was no joyride; it was both dangerous and illegal. They were attempting to steal the eggs of rare falcons...