Category: Guest Contributor

By Sharon Karasick Girl Scouts are encouraged to try all sorts of new things in their scouting experience, a commitment reflected in their new motto: ”When she’s a Girl Scout, she’s also a G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader)™.  While many troops still embrace the traditional three c’s of crafts, camping, and cookies, Girl Scouts are […]

By: Dr. Libby Ellwood Each year, millions of people flock to natural history museums to see examples of plants, animals, gemstones and more from places around the world. But what those visitors don’t get to see are the countless additional specimens behind the scenes. These specimen collections, housed at museums, universities, and other institutions, are […]

Philadelphia, Penn. – (October 10, 2017) –SciStarter and Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) are teaming up to encourage girls to pursue citizen science activities and exploration with new programming in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Girl Scouts of the USA has launched a new “Think Like a Citizen Scientist” series developed specifically to […]

Detecting emotional concepts, such as sarcasm, within a text is not an easy task for an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. For instance, consider the sentence below. Without the emoji present it’s not clear what the author was feeling. The author could have been sad because of a lack of a special someone in his life […]

By: Megan Ray Nichols It’s always fun to have a ladybug land on your arm while outside — but these days, it’s more and more likely that any ladybugs landing on you or the plants in your garden are not native to North America. Over the past three decades, several ladybug species native to North […]

By Dr. Liz MacDonald, founder of Aurorasaurus and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This blog reposted from blog.aurorasaurus.org. Over a century ago, American astronomer W.W. Campbell set up a 40 foot ‘Schaeberle camera’ in Jeur, India to take pictures and study various properties of the sun’s outermost layer called the corona during the […]

By Kayla Keyes, Mote Marine Laboratory Recent news about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been grim: the most recent aerial survey of the reef identified a stretch of bleached coral over 900 miles (1500 km) long, and scientists have declared the reef to be in a terminal stage. Studies have shown that losing the Great […]

This week is Shark Week so we wanted to celebrate by returning to three posts written about Sevengill Sharks and ways you can support their conservation through the Sevengill Sharks Tracking Project.  The first post (seen below) was published in 2013 with others following in 2015 and 2016.  Not really into carnivorous fish? Check out […]

By Brad Mehlenbacher (North Carolina State University) and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher (University of Waterloo) Through citizen science projects, the Bodleian Library is improving access to their music collections, the Smithsonian is transcribing important documents, and researchers at the University of Oxford are transcribing Ancient Greek text from Greco-Roman Egypt. Although these projects represent promising examples […]

There is a lot to learn from bees. The survival of the hive depends on the combined efforts of the entire colony. In Conetoe (pronounced KUH-nee-tah), North Carolina Reverend Richard Joyner and his family of youth beekeepers are tending to bees and building community, one hive at a time. Reverend Joyner is the force behind […]