Author: nate

In 2017, Jim Webster began going out at night near his New Jersey home to take pictures of our galaxy. With a 14-millimeter lens and a DSLR, he would capture long exposures of the Milky Way galaxy, revealing the delicate filaments of nebulae and countless clusters of stars hidden within the band of the galaxy’s […]

As fall begins across the Northern Hemisphere, hundreds of millions of birds are preparing for a journey that can take them thousands of miles to warmer climates near the equator. These fall migrations are both a simple fact of life for many avian species, and an epic adventure that takes them halfway across the globe. […]

When you make citizen science observations, you might enter the information into an app, take a photo or answer a few questions in an online form and hit submit. That might be the end of your part of the process, but submitting a data point is just the first step in the long, rigorous journey […]

This fall, between September 15 and October 15, more than 30,000 volunteers combed through forests, fields and even their own backyards in search of the humble mushroom. They were participating in the Great North American FungiQuest, a massive bioblitz that aimed to find and identify as many fungi as possible in the span of just […]

While we might imagine a scientist as a chemist concocting substances in a lab, or a biologist diving with sea creatures, the reality is often far more mundane. Much of science involves collecting and analyzing data, and that process isn’t always very exciting. Think counting bacteria in a petri dish, or noting if two stars […]

Our oceans are vast, powerful and mysterious — and even after centuries of study, there are still many things scientists don’t know about our planet’s blue expanses. But the ocean affects all of our lives intimately, even those of us who live far from the coast. Oceans provide food for billions of people, shape weather […]

With the release of its first 100,000 genomes, all from volunteers, the All of Us project is on its way to solving one of the most pernicious problems in modern medicine: a startling lack of diversity. The National Institutes of Health project, which launched in 2018, will eventually gather genetic information and other medical data […]

SciStarter has hundreds of citizen science projects to choose from, and our more than 110,000 registered members participate in a diverse range of projects that match their individual interests and passions. But there are a few perennial favorites among our citizen science projects, and perhaps none more popular than the Alzheimer’s-fighting game Stall Catchers. Run […]

When a group of friends met up in the tropical forests of Indonesia, they were expecting to take in the verdant surroundings and hopefully nab a few photos of the colorful butterflies that congregate in the area. That’s what Yi-Kai Tea and his buddies found on the island of Sulawesi, nestled in the midst of […]

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 […]