Blog: Citizen Science Projects, People, and Perspectives
Calling all water monitoring groups! It is time for the annual Secchi Dip-In. From now until July 22, volunteer and professional water monitoring groups are being asked to take transparency measurements in a local body of water. A secchi disk is a common tool for measuring water turbidity, or water cloudiness. Turbidity is caused by … Read more “The Secchi Dip-In”
Categories: Citizen Science, Ecology & Environment, Geology & Earth Sciences, Nature & Outdoors, Ocean & Water
This is a guest post by Dr. Melinda Hough, PhD in Microbiology from Olympia, WA. Twitter: @theroamingnome SciStarter brings you curated citizen science projects under new themes on a bi-weekly basis. Be sure to check out the “Building Blocks of Life” featured projects for this cycle! Humans spend more than 3 billion hours playing video … Read more “Building Blocks of Life: Tracking Genetic Diseases Through Casual Gaming”
Categories: Citizen Science
Back in January I met Glendon Mellow at Science Online. Since then I’ve been following his impressive work at the intersection of art and science and thinking a lot about where the relationship between the two might be found in citizen science. Scientific American’s Symbiartic blog has featured numerous articles about the intersection of science … Read more “Citizen Science and Art: Exploring biohackers and bioartists”
Categories: Citizen Science
Imagine trying to uncover the meaning behind all the words in the English language. Well, that’s what dictionaries are for, right? Not quite. According to Joshua Hartshorne, the director of MIT’s Games With Words, our current understanding of any word is simply based on its relationship with other words. That’s precisely the problem. To provide … Read more “Games With Words: Play On”
Categories: Citizen Science
I like to call it an antipiphany* – that striking realization of the magnitude of what can be known, which reduces what you actually understand to a paltry amount. I’ve seen it again and again with graduate students: they enroll feeling like smarty-pants, and within a year they are humbled by an antipiphany. Eventually … Read more “That Moment When You Realize How Little You Actually Know”
Categories: Astronomy & Space, Citizen Science, Do-It-Yourself, Nature & Outdoors, Science Education Standards
SciStarter’s editors write and manage the SciStarter blog and the CitizenSci blog on the Public Library of Science website. They are planning a series of posts to review research outcomes and emergent technologies from a representative set of projects. If you’d like to share the research outcomes from your project and new, related emergent technologies, … Read more “Researchers: Share your citizen science success stories with SciStarter, PLOS, and Discover Magazine”
Categories: Citizen Science
DNA, RNA, and proteins are literally the stuff of life. These building blocks need to be stacked just so or things can go awry. Help researchers twist, fold, push and pull these tiny molecules into various shapes by playing these fun games. Or, let your computer fold proteins while you sleep! Here are this week’s featured … Read more “Playing With the Building Blocks of Life”
Categories: Citizen Science, Newsletter
Recruit More Participants for Your Project Did you know that in addition to the services we provide at no cost, SciStarter helps grantees and organizations reach new audiences and broaden the impact of research? Consider SciStarter as you develop your grant proposals! We identify and recruit targeted participants for citizen science projects. Whether you are … Read more “SciStarter will recruit participants for your citizen science project.”
Categories: Citizen Science
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is on a new mission: to encourage citizen scientists to learn more about the air, water, and resources around them. Earlier this year, the EPA’s Region 2 office announced its newest tool, MyEnvironment. This project provides immediate access to a cross-section of environmental data for any geographical location in the … Read more “On Air: The EPA’s Brand New Citizen Science Tool”
Categories: Citizen Science, Ecology & Environment
Get out the data: making change through citizen science Non-partisan campaigns to get out the vote occur before every election. It helps remind us of our rights and responsibilities to participate in a democratic society. But we all too often forget that voting is only one of the ways we can contribute to our collective … Read more “Citizen Science Champions of Change!”
Categories: Citizen Science
