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 […]

  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 […]

Through a community effort, the Girl Scouts of Southwest Indiana got ready to become citizen scientists at six different sessions in two locations in the council April 24 and 25, 2021.  More than 80 girls in grades K-10 and their leaders worked to sharpen their scientific observation skills through a series of games, demonstrations and […]

Wicked high tides, also known as king tides or astronomical high tides, are a natural phenomenon that occur several times a year in certain areas around the globe. In the Boston area, these events usually happen in March and October. This is when there is a full or new moon, and the Earth, Sun and […]

On SciStarter, personalized, recommended projects now include explanations to describe how projects are matched to logged in users. Through SciStarter, millions of people participate in thousands of citizen science projects that engage the public to help crowdsource answers to research questions. Finding the right project for you among thousands of options can be like finding […]