Category: Climate & Weather

Sometimes, science is the happy companion of art. Take Spiral Jetty, a piece by the late sculptor Robert Smithson. In 1970, Smithson arranged 6,650 tons of basalt boulders into a spiral that reaches 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. Built during a drought, the stony coil soon disappeared beneath the lake’s rising, algae-reddened waters. […]

Think you can spot the difference between and a honey bee and a bumble bee? Well, there’s one day left to test your bee knowledge with the online Bee Challenge, brought to you by the folks at the Great Pollinator Project! A collaboration between the Greenbelt Native Plant Nursery and the Center for Biodiversity and […]

One of the many jewels in San Francisco’s crown is the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum where creativity and science collide in ever more imaginative ways. And among the imaginative projects the museum has backed recently is artist-programmer-musician Ken Murphy’s film, A History of the Sky. Murphy, an Exploratorium artist in residence, is creating a time-lapse […]

Now that spring has sprung in the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature is tempting winter-weary citizen scientists out of doors with all kinds of colorful, action-packed events. Buds are bursting forth, chatty bird couples are flirting and building nests, and the excitable atmospheric conditions of the new season are conjuring up fresh cloud patterns in the […]

Tired of winter? Are snowball fights, sledding, and snowmen just not cutting it anymore? I just might have the cure for those winter blues: SnowTweets, a new citizen science project that uses the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter, to gather snow depth measurements from all over the world. Measuring snow is actually as easy as sticking […]