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. […]

By now, you’ve  almost certainly heard the news: Homemade sourdough is the  greatest thing since, well, sliced bread.  Being stuck in quarantine gives many of us more time to do things around the house, like baking. And stores are short on household staples, including bread, so, sure, might as well give breadmaking a try. But why sourdough […]

In 1984, a small group of California surfers were fed up with the development and water pollution at their favorite break, Malibu’s Surfrider Beach. They took their environmental concerns to California State Parks officials — and prevailed. The Surfrider Foundation was born. Since then, the nonprofit has kept its focus on improving coastal water quality. […]

A few years ago, Alvaro Antonio Vanegas, a software engineer and avid cyclist, got tired of the air pollution problems in his hometown of Bogota, Colombia. He decided to join forces with an activist already researching the problem, Daniel Bernal, who he’d heard was building his own rudimentary air quality sensors and using them to […]

Today, over 1.5 billion children are unable to go to school. Beyond public health and the economy, coronavirus is disrupting how we engage and educate younger generations ⁠— and a group of global environmental education experts have started a program to help. TED Education, The United Nations Environmental Programme and many other partners launched Earth […]

A version of this post was originally published on the Citizen Science Association Blog. First: thank you. Even with the unprecedented challenges, so many of you came together to make Global Citizen Science Month 2020 (April) a success. We are crunching numbers and assessing formative and summative evaluations so we can share a comprehensive report. […]

Plastic pollution in our oceans is a major, on-going global crisis. Researchers estimate that 8 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. Much of the plastic is dumped carelessly, on land or in rivers, and then carried or blown into the sea. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are already known […]

Educators, parents, and lifelong learners joined Jill Nugent and the SciStarter team each Thursday at 8:00 PM ET during April’s Citizen Science Month for a five-part education webinar series. These webinars focused on sharing citizen science projects that are a great fit for the science learning environment, with an emphasis on projects that our distributed […]

Kids and adults both coo at the sight of a crawling caterpillar. We imagine that this hungry caterpillar may flutter past someday as a beautiful butterfly. Caterpillars and other insects with segmented bodies are called arthropods. And scientists need your help with a citizen science project aimed at understanding how these insects’ populations are changing. […]

Learn more about Chasing Steve on SciStarter. When Leah Mallen and I headed to Alberta, Canada to film a documentary about aurora chasers who had discovered a new phenomenon in the night sky, we didn’t know what to expect. As Canadians, we knew that auroras were light displays caused by solar wind. We’d heard of […]