Category: Blogs

Citizen Science Citizen Science Connected Blog 

Help Audubon Protect Threatened Birds

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Audubon’s Climate Watch Program needs volunteers to help it spot 12 birds threatened by climate change. Are you in? “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Is there hope for our feathered friends in the era of climate change? Yes, but they need our help. More than 300 North American birds will likely lose over 50 percent of their current geographical range by 2080, according to Audubon’s 2014 Birds and Climate Change Report. This means that the areas with the climate conditions these…

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Biology Citizen Science Connected Blog Oceanography 

Why Citizen Scientists Study Phytoplankton in Antarctica

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By Allison Cusick and Verena Meraldi Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography are working with Antarctic tour operators like Hurtigurten to enable vacationers to serve as citizen scientists with the FjordPhyto citizen science project. Travelers collect samples of phytoplankton from Antarctic fjords in an effort to understand the base of the food web, helping scientists learn how one of the most fertile ocean regions in the world may be changing. Human Impact in Remote Areas You would think that the most remote continent on Earth, Antarctica, would be the least…

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Book Reviews Citizen Science Connected Blog 

Changing Methods of Science Communication Online

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by Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher Science Communication Online: A New Book Exploring How We Do and Share Science On the Internet. Free access! An open access copy under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license is also available from The Ohio State University Press, and you can download a copy here: https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/87159 —or, you may purchase the book from the press or most major book retailers. When we discuss science communication, we often talk about it as either targeted at professional scientists or as targeted at the public. However, with the…

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Citizen Science Connected Blog 

Alzheimer’s research furthered with citizen science games

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A team of researchers at the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University seek to understand what causes a 30% reduction of blood flow to the brain in Alzheimer’s patients. Preliminary findings from the Schaffer-Nishimura Biomedical Engineering Lab suggest that restoring blood flow to the brain could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s and restore cognitive functioning. But there is too much data to sift through, and the blood flow imagery is too subtle for most algorithms to classify into capillaries that are either flowing or stalled. So instead, citizen scientists are…

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Citizen Science Citizen Science Connected Blog Environment Health 

Empowering Communities to Examine Lead Exposure with Crowd the Tap

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By Bradley Allf Lead pipes for transporting water have been a fixture of modern civilization for more than two thousand years.  Ancient Romans channeled water into homes and bathhouses through lead piping. In fact, the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is where we get the English word “plumbing.” Yet we have also long recognized that lead can have a serious impact on our health. Vitrivius, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote at length about the physical harm caused by lead exposure, concluding that “water should therefore on no…

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Citizen Science Citizen Science Connected Blog 

Sound Around Town Uses Data to Combat Noise Pollution

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By Bradley Allf At the start of World War I, thousands of soldiers were coming down with a baffling condition: they became blind, deaf, lost their memory, or developed uncontrollable shaking despite no obvious physical injury. Even stranger, this malady could be triggered by memories of the war even after the fighting had ended. At the time, doctors called what they were seeing “shell-shock,” though today we would call it by a different name: post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that brought back memories of the trenches could precipitate this condition, but…

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Book Reviews Citizen Science Connected Blog Ecology Oceanography 

Book Review: a World Without Fish and Unraveling Ocean Life

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by Patricia Balbon Day-to-day encounters of fish—at the grocery store, visiting an aquarium—passively reinforce a notion of triviality about aquatic life until we are prompted to take a pause and spare a thought for a breathtaking world beyond the shore. This month’s selection in our ongoing book review series, World Without Fish, prompts such reflection; however, as the pages turn, we witness the marine world’s vulnerability alongside its majesty.  Through Mark Kurlansky’s words and Frank Stockton’s art, we are challenged by the crisis of disappearing biodiversity in our oceans.  This…

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Animals Citizen Science Citizen Science Connected Blog Ecology 

Citizen Science in Nebraska is Bigger Than You Think

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by Megan Ray Nichols (@nicholsrmegan) In Nebraska, scientists working for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission are increasingly relying on casual researchers and citizen scientists to better understand three creatures in particular: spotted skunks, salamanders, and regal fritillary butterflies. Why? The populations of these species have either declined or are in jeopardy, and scientists want to get a current population count. Let’s take a closer look at these three Nebraskan citizen science projects and what researchers hope to learn from data collected by citizen scientists. Nebraska is a big state.…

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Citizen Science Connected Blog Education 

Cyberchase Makes Math and Science Exciting, Fun, and Relevant to Kids

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By Bob Krech Based on my many years of teaching elementary math and science, I know that when kids are bored with math and science, it’s usually because they don’t see the point of how these subjects could be useful or interesting in the context of their real lives. Kids want to apply their math and science skills to make things happen! One great way to help them do this and see the value of these subjects is to introduce the idea of citizen science. Citizen science creates connections for…

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Citizen Science Connected Blog 

Citizen Science Connected, a New Blog Platform

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SciStarter and Science Connected are partnering to produce a new blog platform: Citizen Science Connected. Citizen science is a way for regular people to do real research, and the Citizen Science Connected platform is a place to tell those stories. The fields that citizen science advances are diverse: ecology, astronomy, medicine, psychology, linguistics, genetics, engineering, and many more. Science Connected is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publisher of science nonfiction for a general audience and resources for science teachers. The organization is powered by a global group of scientists and science communicators…

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