Category: In the News

The Knight Foundation today announced the latest winners of its Knight Prototype Fund. Eighteen projects will receive $35,000 to help them bring their concepts closer to fruition and one of the 18 projects is ours: SciStarter ‘s project will connect data journalists and researchers with citizen scientists who are interested in helping them collect data about […]

Listen. Let’s get one thing straight: I am an unabashed public radio nerd. So, when citizen science and public radio come together, I am nothing short of ecstatic. But it’s not just my public radio nerdiness for its own sake. Rather, this convergence speaks to a larger narrative (for me, at least) — that of […]

How to use the American Meteor Society’s smartphone app (iOS and Android) to create observer reports of fireballs and meteors during the Camelopardalids this weekend. Coming soon to a sky near you: a brand new meteor shower! Barring all cloudy conditions and light-polluted landscapes, you should be able to bear witness to the Camelopardalids this […]

What happens when you combine professional cheerleaders, microbiologists, and astronauts? The answer is Project MERCCURI and the Microbial Playoffs… in SPAAACE! SPACE FLORIDA, FL — Today, something  amazing is headed toward the ISS—microbial life from earth!This moment is the culmination of a citizen science experiment called Project MERCCURI (Microbial Ecology Research Combining Citizen and University […]

This week on The Pulse and SciStarter’s segment about citizen science, producer Kimberly Haas highlights some spring projects that you can get involved in this season. Spring is in the air, and so it citizen science! As SciStarter founder Darlene Cavalier told WHYY, “Springtime is the time for citizen science […] So you can find, in […]

The story of a nuclear disaster and what can do you as a citizen scientist to help assess the residual aftermath. [In the news – KQED Science recently spoke to project organizer Ken Buessler about the radiation in our ocean.] Three years ago on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami shook Japan. The […]

This week on The Pulse and SciStarter’s segment about citizen science, producer Kimberly Haas  tags along with local birdwatcher Pat Evans as she studies migratory bird patterns and fluxes in bird populations from New Jersey. The Great Backyard Bird Count takes place from February 14th to 17th this year, so get started and let us know how many birds […]

The non-profit Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) previously won a Knight News Challenge in 2011 and received $500,000 to fund a tool kit and online community for citizen-based, grassroots data gathering and research. The second Knight News Challenge the group won, a $350,000 Knight award focused on health data, will allow the group […]

Thanks to the Independence National Historical Park for giving me access to the Liberty Bell. I had a lot of fun collecting microbes from this national treasure in my hometown! Happy to announce that the microbes from the Liberty Bell have been selected to fly on the International Space Station where their growth rates will […]

This week on The Pulse and SciStarter’s segment about citizen science, producer Kimberly Haas talks to IceWatch USA and Nature’s Notebook (a project of the National Phenology Network) to explore what local bodies of water can tell us about climate change. Listen here! Here’s an excerpt from WHYY’s related blog post: “Concerns about climate change often focus on melting ice: glaciers […]