Category: Project Profile

Have you watched your cat make a beeline for an empty box or zoom around the room after a nap and wondered: why do they do that?  Scientists have pondered the same questions, but there are few definitive answers. Despite being our companions for centuries, our scientific understanding of cats is surprisingly sparse. This knowledge […]

Freshwater macroinvertebrates. While not a household name, we’ve all experienced their impact. Ever swat a mosquito? Watched a dragonfly swoop by? Walked through a swarm of midges? Then you have seen a freshwater macroinvertebrate – albeit in its adult, terrestrial form.  Freshwater macroinvertebrates are organisms that live in freshwater (lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and wetlands) […]

This is a guest blog post by a citizen science project leader. Have you been diagnosed with lung cancer? Or are you a family member or friend of someone who has been diagnosed? Then we – the LUNGevity Foundation – would like to invite you to join our new study: Project PEER. By getting involved, […]

TrophyCatch is a project focused on turning everyday anglers into citizen-scientists! People across the state of Florida are invited to participate. It all starts with going fishing for an 8+ lbs. largemouth bass and taking photo or video documentation of the entire bass, on a scale with the weight showing. Then, the fish must be […]

In the United States, it is estimated that more than one million vertebrate animals are killed by vehicle collisions every day. Yet, despite the ubiquity of roadkill, there is actually little comprehensive data on how many animals are killed by cars every year. The U.S. has no national database for roadkill, and most states don’t […]

Note: Portions of this article came from a description of Stall Catchers previously written by SciStarter. Across the United States, 5.7 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the seventh leading cause of death in America. But there is still no treatment or cure. Alzheimer’s hits close to home for many of us who have […]

Last summer, my friend Henry Gargan became obsessed with birds. Everywhere I went with him — on a walk in the park, downtown or even driving in the car — became a birding expedition. The bird on the signpost had to be scoped out. That eerie call — a wood thrush or a hermit thrush? […]

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 […]

QuestaGame is a free-to-play, outdoor mobile adventure game that is fun for all ages. You can participate in QuestaGame year-round, but from August 1-30, QuestaGame is running a Global Schools BioQuest. As part of this BioQuest, teachers and/or parents can create free teams which allow their students to work (and play) together as they compete against other […]

It’s the New Year, and in addition to eating better, exercising regularly, and watching fewer videos of adorable talking porcupines (#STOPTHECUTENESS!), we at SciStarter resolve to make every human (all 7.5 billion of you, as well as your pets) a citizen scientist by the end of 2020…or by 2120 at the latest! In that spirit, […]