Author: ericbetz

With the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering schools, as a parent, you may be looking for fun and easy ways to help teach science to your kids at home. Or maybe your family just spent the summer outdoors observing Comet NEOWISE and now you want some supplementary educational resources to teach your kids about the night sky. […]

Deja Perkins loved animals growing up. And by the time she left her native Chicago to attend Tuskegee University in Alabama, she wanted to become a veterinarian, often the only animal-related career introduced to people of color, she says. But it didn’t take long before Perkins realized she’d rather study animals in the natural world. […]

A few years ago, Alvaro Antonio Vanegas, a software engineer and avid cyclist, got tired of the air pollution problems in his hometown of Bogota, Colombia. He decided to join forces with an activist already researching the problem, Daniel Bernal, who he’d heard was building his own rudimentary air quality sensors and using them to […]

Virtually every galaxy bigger than our Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center. These supermassive black holes can weigh tens of millions of times more than our sun. How do black holes grow so gigantic? And why are supermassive black holes at the heart of so many galaxies? A citizen science project […]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a time of year when many people by get outside to take part in community clean ups and environmental celebrations. But this year is different. Schools and parks have closed, and we’re left to celebrate while social distancing. This list of citizen science activities and projects can […]