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 […]

Erin Canter found her way to the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, in eastern Tennessee, from what she describes as a very “stereotypical science” background: white coat, gloves, sequencing DNA in a lab. But “that didn’t quite do it for me,” she says. After six months spent mostly outdoors living in a tent while […]

Oceans give our world life. Phytoplankton breathe out 70 percent of our oxygen, and the oceans’  currents and other physical properties are responsible for our weather and climate. Scientists have long been keeping tabs on the ocean with vast networks of sensors, satellites and other equipment, in order to understand more about how it works […]

On June 21, 2019, Sonya Richmond and Sean Morton took the first steps on an odyssey that would take them across the second-largest country on Earth. The duo is currently in the middle of a quest to walk the entirety of the Trans Canada Trail, a network of paths that stretches for thousands of miles […]

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? […]

In April 2021, SciStarter, the Network of the National Library of Medicine, the All of Us Research Program, Arizona State University and other partners commemorated the second annual Citizen Science Month. Previously, partners had celebrated Citizen Science Day starting in 2016, but the global community expanded the celebration to a month in 2020. This year’s […]

Gluttonous space tourists from another dimension are creating portals into our world, with the aim of turning Earth into a popular alien theme park, and the InterDimensional Council, or IDC, needs Earth-based citizen scientists to stop them!  Is this the latest conspiracy theory? Nope (at least not yet). It’s the premise behind a new augmented reality (AR) […]

On December 13, trucks loaded with coronavirus vaccine doses and dry ice poured out from Pfizer’s production facility in Michigan. Moderna’s own deliveries soon followed. And in the more than six months since then, nearly half of all Americans have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Researchers raced to create the much-needed drug and delivered one in […]

Anyone, anywhere, at any time can turn their curiosity about nature into real-world impact by volunteering online with citizen science. Caroline Nickerson, Miss Louisiana Earth, is hosting an online challenge with SciStarter, Cartoscope, Healthy Gulf and Northeastern University for the general public from August 1 – August 14 to volunteer online and map land loss. […]

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down in the spring of 2020, teachers, librarians, camp counsellors, park rangers and more found themselves scrambling to adapt. Although the virus drastically altered plans, the learning didn’t necessarily stop thanks to the tireless efforts of educators of all kinds.  In many cases, teachers and others found themselves […]