Month: July 2013

Think you’re safe in your pools this summer? You better double check! This invasive species has been taking over the mid-Atlantic region of the east coast. Contributor Nick Fordes gives us the scoop. I am always pleasantly surprised by the creativity of new citizen science projects.  Not only are projects using the power of crowdsourcing […]

SciStarter contributors, Lily Bui, Caren Cooper, and Darlene Cavalier, developed this citizen science primer page on SciStarter. Please feel free to suggest additions and edits. We hope this serves as a starting point for anyone thinking about dipping their toes into this exciting and emerging field! The Citizen Science page on SciStarter addresses the following questions […]

SciStarter brings you curated citizen science projects under new themes on a bi-weekly basis. Be sure to check out the other “DNA Barcoding” featured projects for this cycle! Have you ever wanted to know how many different species of creepy crawlies you can spot in a weekend? ‘Biotrailers’ are doing just that at the Mount […]

Here are this week’s featured projects on SciStarter. Interested in learning about more citizen science projects? Try our Project Finder, which connects you to 600+ curated projects around the world! We’ve scanned our database for awesome DNA barcoding citizen science projects! We are all familiar with barcodes, but what do barcodes have to do with […]

Calling all water monitoring groups! It is time for the annual Secchi Dip-In. From now until July 22, volunteer and professional water monitoring groups are being asked to take transparency measurements in a local body of water. A secchi disk is a common tool for measuring water turbidity, or water cloudiness. Turbidity is caused by […]

This is a guest post by Dr. Melinda Hough, PhD in Microbiology from Olympia, WA. Twitter: @theroamingnome SciStarter brings you curated citizen science projects under new themes on a bi-weekly basis. Be sure to check out the  “Building Blocks of Life” featured projects for this cycle! Humans spend more than 3 billion hours playing video […]

Back in January I met Glendon Mellow at Science Online. Since then I’ve been following his impressive work at the intersection of art and science and thinking a lot about where the relationship between the two might be found in citizen science. Scientific American’s Symbiartic blog has featured numerous articles about the intersection of science […]

Imagine trying to uncover the meaning behind all the words in the English language. Well, that’s what dictionaries are for, right? Not quite. According to Joshua Hartshorne, the director of MIT’s Games With Words, our current understanding of any word is simply based on its relationship with other words. That’s precisely the problem. To provide […]

  I like to call it an antipiphany* – that striking realization of the magnitude of what can be known, which reduces what you actually understand to a paltry amount. I’ve seen it again and again with graduate students: they enroll feeling like smarty-pants, and within a year they are humbled by an antipiphany. Eventually […]

SciStarter’s editors write and manage the SciStarter blog and the CitizenSci blog on the Public Library of Science website. They are planning a series of posts to review research outcomes and emergent technologies from a representative set of projects. If you’d like to share the research outcomes from your project and new, related emergent technologies, […]