Tag: air 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 […]

In early 2018, Scistarter and Arizona State University began the process of collaborating with a local community, Boulder Ridge, to measure the quality of its air. Boulder Ridge is a 55 and older retirement community in Phoenix. Over the past three years, Boulder Ridge residents began to notice increased blasting, crushing, and trucking out of […]

When smog is so thick that it clouds our vision, we can see and acknowledge that air pollution is a problem. In December of last year, China issued its second ever red alert, their highest rating for air pollution, and last month, London broke modern air pollution records. But on days when the haze has […]

By: Elizabeth Kittrie, Senior Advisor for Data Science, National Institutes of Health In the spirit of open science – a movement to make data and other information from scientific research available to everyone — the National Institutes of Health invites you to cast your vote and help us decide which of the projects competing for […]

The holiday season is upon us! In the spirit of the season, we’ve put together another edition of our annual 12 Days of Christmas Newsletter. ANNNNNNNND…as our gift to you, we’ve made it possible for you to track your citizen science contributions and interests in one place! Check out the beta version of SciStarter 2.0. […]

What if you had access to air quality data — minute-by- minute — from hundreds of locations in your community at the same time? How would you manage that data– and how would you share it with your local residents? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is offering two communities $40,000 each to help figure that out. Currently, environmental […]

  Editors Note: This is a guest post by Gwen Ottinger, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University.  She has done extensive research on community-based air monitoring and community-industry relations around oil refineries.  She is author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU Press […]

Did you know that you can contribute to science by blowing bubbles? It’s true! The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network is asking citizen scientists in England to use bubbles to calculate wind direction and speed. All you need to do is create a “bubble cone” using a piece of paper and some tape. Then, with some […]

A new partnership between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency is combining detailed scientific information on air and water quality with observations made by citizen scientists. Ever wondered about the air quality in Copenhagen? Or perhaps the water quality in Paris? Eye on Earth uses Microsoft’s Bing Maps to combine goespatial and environmental data from […]