Category: Citizen Science

Most of us are aware of the bacteria on the surfaces we come in contact with. The doorknob for the bathroom, coins and paper currency in our pockets, handrails in subway cars, computer keyboards and mice at the library… the list of built environments on which microbes thrive is nearly endless. In our preoccupation with […]

The Trumpeter Swan is the largest bird in North America, but in the early 20th Century, they were extremely hard to see. Over-hunted for their feathers and skins, these beautiful birds once teetered on extinction. In the early 1900s, fewer than 100 remained in the wild. Despite decades of subsequent protection under the Migratory Bird […]

Drumroll, please! Here are SciStarter’s top 11 citizen science projects from the past year. The list was generated based on the number of visits in our Project Finder. Thanks for joining our journey. Wait until you hear what we’ve got cooking for 2012! Happy New Year from the SciStarter team! 11. ClimatePrediction.net Climateprediction.net is a distributed […]

Drumroll, please! Here are the top 11 SciStarter blog posts from the past year (according to the number of visits). Thanks for joining our journey. Wait until you hear what we’ve got cooking for 2012! Happy New Year from the SciStarter team! PS Stay tuned — we’ll post the top 11 citizen science projects of […]

Make sure you’re on Santa’s “nice list” this year. Consider helping researchers help the planet this holiday season. Here are a dozen opportunities to get involved in real research during the 12 days of Christmas! On the first day of Christmas, Missouri gave to me…an opportunity to help stem the threat of invasive pear trees […]

Step back to 1995. You have a paper address book – family, friends, business – but it’s too big. You’ve been so many places and met so many people that you can’t distinguish John Smith the college buddy from John Smith at the office. It’s time to get organized with a computer program. You buy […]

Welcome to the new and improved Science for Citizens…now known as SciStarter! The upgrade was designed to make it easier for you to find, learn about, and get involved in citizen science projects of interest to you. Now, you can search by topic (birds, astronomy, etc) or by activity (while at the beach, on a […]

They found paper wasps, cactus flies and fruit flies. They saw dragonflies and butterflies zooming about. And when they peered into bushes like hackberry and creosote they saw ants, termites and ground beetles living underneath. They even found beetles in an old soda can.

The Sungrazer project allows amateur astronomers world-wide to discover comets in images from NASA’s SOHO and STEREO missions… now with over 2000 discoveries!

Wow! Take a look at the map on the Great World Wide Star Count website. The fall campaign started yesterday and already there are oodles of citizen scientists from around the world posting their data. Citizen scientists from China, Australia, India, Kuwait, Egypt, South Africa, the European Union, Canada, United States, and Mexico have gotten involved so far. They are all looking at how bright the stars are overhead to help us get a better understanding of how streetlights, porch lights, car headlights and other nighttime lights affect how we see the stars in the sky.