Category: Other

  Have you seen a ghost forest? As sea levels rise around the world, coastlines are increasingly marked by lingering stands of dead trees. The cause of death isn’t a mystery. Sea level rise is intensifying the effects of flooding and pushing saltwater into low lying coastal ecosystems. That saltwater kills the trees, leaving behind […]

For nearly a thousand years, Jews at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo stored their worn-out, torn, or otherwise unusable manuscript fragments — everything from biblical texts to business ledgers, Talmudic commentaries to children’s writing exercises — in the geniza, or storage room. During the nineteenth century, the archive was excavated by British academics […]

For most of human history, we slept under the stars. Instead of staring at electronic screens, our ancestors watched the light from the heavens. Things have changed dramatically in recent decades. Seven out of 10 people living in the U.S. today have never seen the Milky Way. Light pollution from street lights, homes, businesses and […]

Anyone, anywhere can plan a Citizen Science Month (April 2021) program or effort! SciStarter and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) at Arizona State University, with support from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM), are engaging the public to help speed up research on […]

Sometimes the old methods truly are the best methods. When astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, it was the result of countless hours spent straining his eyes at a machine called a blink comparator. Using it, Tombaugh could flip rapidly back and forth between two images of the night sky taken at slightly different […]

Every year around Christmas time, tens of thousands of volunteer birdwatchers gather in familiar locations across the Western Hemisphere for a tradition that dates back more than a century. On select days between December 14 and January 5, volunteers with the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count take a census of every bird they see […]

In today’s world, computers both big and small produce vast volumes of data in record time — millions of trillions of bytes worth. It’s so much information that researchers can’t properly analyze all the data produced, and the overload can also lead computers to make mistakes. That’s why researchers are increasingly turning to citizen scientists […]

Air quality impacts our health, our quality of life and even the length of our lives. Most people don’t think about what’s in the air they breathe — but perhaps they should. That’s the driving force behind the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative. The citizen science project wants to let people know what’s in their air. […]

April 2021 is Global Citizen Science Month, and SciStarter, the National Library of Medicine, Arizona State University, the Citizen Science Association and many other partners from around the world provide free resources, support and an event calendar to help you plan and promote your event. I’m Caroline Nickerson, SciStarter’s Program Manager for Global Citizen Science […]

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. […]