Year: 2021

SciStarter and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) at Arizona State University, with support from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM), are engaging the public to help speed up research on human and environmental health. (Tempe, Arizona) — March 3, 2021 […]

More than 100 years ago, Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering decided he was going to take a picture of the entire night sky. Or, rather, many thousands of pictures, each capturing a tiny rectangle of the universe as seen through a telescope. Today, these photos survive on hundreds of thousands of glass plates at the […]

Citizen science joins the general public with the scientific community in creating a collaborative relationship to increase scientific knowledge.  All kinds of people can take part in citizen science projects by collecting and sharing data.  The possibilities are endless, and the contributions are immense!  So, for me, it was only natural that I should become […]

  All grantees must:  Demonstrate or present a compelling plan for building awareness of and planning for active involvement in citizen science using resources found on SciStarter.org/library-resources, CitizenScienceMonth.org-resources and SciStarter.org/NLM.  Promote the NIH’s All of Us Research Program as one important example of a citizen science project that aims to engage one million volunteers to […]

Your experience of climate change is likely different than that of your relatives living in another state, and probably even different than your cross-town friends. The dispersed nature of climate effects means that they can be felt differently across individual neighborhoods, even within the same city block. Seemingly mundane factors drive these differences: how much […]

In 1902, an international trade deal was brokered between the U.S. and Canada. Frank Baker, superintendent of the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., had been working on the deal for some time. In a letter from 1900 sent to several addresses in Ontario, Canada, Baker explains he is “very desirous of obtaining” a particular […]

Innovating and finding ways to stay connected to members has been a challenge for almost every organization during 2020. The Girl Scouts of Southeast Florida Council (GSSEF) were able to connect virtually through the Think Like a Citizen Scientist Journey on SciStarter during the summer of 2020. This effort allowed the Council to safely reach […]

Sometimes the old methods truly are the best methods. When astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, it was the result of countless hours spent straining his eyes at a machine called a blink comparator. Using it, Tombaugh could flip rapidly back and forth between two images of the night sky taken at slightly different […]

The future of individualized medicine may depend on an army of one million volunteers. And scientists want you to get involved.  Researchers with the National Institutes of Health are recruiting citizen scientists to enlist in a study of unprecedented scope and depth. The program, called All of Us, promises to take personal data from a […]

In its 4.5 billion year history, our planet has experienced five mass extinctions. Many scientists believe we are on the verge of a sixth mass extinction, and this one is on us. Humans are to blame. Planet at Risk The consequences of our actions too often go unseen. The impacts caused by driving a car […]