Education

How many stars can you see where you live? The Loss of the Night App (available for Android devices) challenges citizen scientists to identify as many stars as they can in order to measure light pollution. The app is fun and easy to use, and helps users learn constellations as they contribute to a global real-time map of light pollution.

Stargazing is a fantastic way to engage young scientists, but this ancient past time has become increasingly difficult in growing urban areas. Help scientists understand the effects of light pollution and learn about your night sky!

You don't need to leave the city to take part, in fact, the app is designed specifically for use in very polluted areas.

The more stars you observe, and the more often you run the app, the more precise the data for your location will become. As the seasons change so do the stars in the sky, and since there aren't so many very bright stars it is extremely helpful if urban users do measurements in each season.

iPhone users can contribute their own data via the dark sky meter project: http://www.scistarter.com/project/802-Dark%20Sky%20Meter

Anyone without a phone can take part during some parts of the year via GLOBE at Night: http://www.scistarter.com/project/169-GLOBE%20at%20Night

Despite its apparently steady glow, the Sun is a churning mass of superhot plasma that regularly produces powerful flares and storms that can knock out power and communication systems here on Earth. With this Lab explore what makes the Sun so volatile and get access to the same data, images, and tools that scientists use to predict solar storms—so that you can predict them for yourself.

CyberTracker Conservation is a non-profit organisation that promotes the vision of a Worldwide Environmental Monitoring Network. Our ultimate vision is that smart phone users worldwide will use CyberTracker to capture observations on a daily basis.

CyberTracker is the most efficient method of gps field data collection. You can use CyberTracker on a Smartphone or handheld computer to record any type of observation. CyberTracker, which requires no programming skills, allows you to customize an Application for your own data collection needs.

The Marine Debris Tracker mobile application allows you to help make a difference by checking in when you find trash on our coastlines and waterways. Data you submit is available to download online and you also have access to mapping all data, worldwide. Marine Debris Tracker is a joint partnership of the NOAA Marine Debris Division and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative (SEA-MDI), located within the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia.

A study was conducted 40 years ago which suggested a link between climate and when west-European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) come out of hibernation. Last year we repeated this study and over two thousand people logged around 45,000 hedgehogs across Britain. The unusual weather in 2012 has made patterns of activity quite confusing so we are repeating the survey this year to find out more.

We need your help to collect hedgehog records from 1st February until 31st August 2013. Understanding patterns of hedgehog behaviour across the UK will enable us to target the conservation strategy for this charming animal, which is currently in severe decline.

In 2012, scientists in Montreal warned Canadians to expect there will be fewer outdoor skating days in the future.* Their predictions are based on the results of data taken from weather stations across Canada over the last fifty years. In some parts of Canada, they warn there may one day be no more backyard rinks at all. Remember the story of how Wayne Gretzky learned to play hockey on the backyard rink his father made for him in Brantford, Ontario? The scientists’ report says some day that will no longer be possible – at least, not in Brantford.

This prompted a group of geographers at Wilfrid Laurier University to create RinkWatch. We want people from coast to coast to coast to tell us about their rinks. We want you to pin the location of your rink on our map, and then each winter record every day that you are able to skate on it. Think of it as your rink diary. We will gather up all the information from all the backyard rinks, and use it to track the changes in our climate. The RinkWatch website will give you regular updates on the results. You will be able to compare the number of skating days at your rink with rinks elsewhere, and find out who is having the best winter for skating this year.

AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. Each AirCasting session lets you capture real-world measurements, annotate the data to tell your story, and share it via the CrowdMap.

Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share:
(o) sound levels recorded by their phone microphone;
(o) temperature, humidity, CO and NO2 gas concentrations recorded by the Arduino-powered AirCasting Air Monitor, and;
(o) heart rate measurements recorded by the Zephyr HxM.

Using AirCasting Luminescence, these sensor streams can also be represented using LED lights.

Panamath is a free-standing software that can be used to assess number sense - your intuitive recognition of numbers and their relationship. Researchers in laboratories throughout the world have utilized this research tool in studies of number knowledge, mathematical acuity, and learning in general.

Curious? Use Panamath to test your own number sense, read more about the research being done or download the software and adapt it for your own research or educational purposes.

Psychologists at Birkbeck Babylab wants to know what makes babies laugh. We think babies are going to be laughing at things that they are just starting to understand. (Once you know that dogs are supposed to go ‘woof’, a dog that goes ‘miaow’ is only going to be hilarious.) With enough detailed observations from enough babies at different ages we can paint a cheerful picture of what they understand at different ages.

So if you’ve made a baby laugh recently we’d like to hear about it. If you haven’t made a baby laugh recently, go and find one and get to work. It's fun but it's also science!

CoCoRaHS, The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages who measure and report precipitation. By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive website, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications.

Each time a rain, hail, or snow storm occurs, volunteers take measurements of precipitation from their registered locations (reports of 'zero' precipitation are encouraged too!). The reports are submitted to the website and are immediately available for viewing. It's educational, but moreover, fun! Just wait until you start comparing how much rain fell in your backyard vs. your neighbor!

The data are used by the National Weather Service, meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency managers, city utilities, insurance adjusters, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, engineers, mosquito control, ranchers and farmers, outdoor and recreation interests, teachers, students, and neighbors in the community.

Kinsey Reporter is a global mobile survey platform to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex.

Reports are submitted via smartphone, then explored at http://KinseyReporter.org or downloaded for off-line analysis.

The Kinsey Institute is exploring new ways to record and describe people's sexual experiences worldwide. We are also exploring new ways for people to be connected while protecting their privacy. We hope to reach people with all kinds of different ideas, beliefs, and experiences, and who might be willing to report on sexual behaviors, regardless of who is involved and where it is observed. By using Kinsey Reporter, you contribute to research on human sexual behavior. We ask you to act ethically, in the role of a good journalist or "citizen scientist." Submit what is true and accurate to the best of your ability.

Ideally, you would submit a report within 24 hours of the event you are reporting. The report can be about yourself or someone else. It is all anonymous. Kinsey Reporter includes surveys about various sexual activities and other intimate behaviors. These surveys cover sexual behaviors and events, sexual health issues, violence reports, public displays of affection, and other unique behaviors and experience. A 'survey' in this case is a report of information shared by many individuals on a topic of interest; it is not based on a random or representative sample of a community or population.

To ensure that reported data is strictly anonymous, you can only select among the provided tags when answering a question. However, contact us to suggest new surveys, questions, or tags.

To protect the anonymity of the reports even in sparsely populated areas, we aggregate reports over time. A report is not published until a sufficient number of reports have been received from the same location, and then all of those reports are recorded with a randomized timestamp. The more sparsely populated your area and/or the higher the geographic resolution you select, the longer the delay until your report appears. Therefore, in a sparsely populated area, you might want to select a lower resolution (e.g., state/region or country), to minimize the delay until your report becomes public.

Interactive visualizations of the data are available on the KinseyReporter.org website. The anonymous data we collect is also publicly available to the community via an Application Programming Interface (API), documented on the KinseyReporter.org website. We welcome your feedback.

Kinsey Reporter is a joint project of the world-famous Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (KI) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS), both at Indiana University, Bloomington.

As you probably know, the earth’s natural system is changing. Many of the aspects of how, where and when is well known within the scientific community, yet the public is slow to accept the science behind these global changes.

In response to the need for a better informed and scientifically literate populace, the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop a web-based resource for educators and the general public that will provide rigorously-vetted, non-partisan, scientific information on global change, specifically how the earth’s natural systems are changing.

If you are a teacher/science educator, we need your help! We would like to have a better sense of how teachers (middle school and above, in both formal and informal settings) view global change, the importance of teaching it, and the resources available for doing so. By participating, you can help to inform the development of a new web resource: Understanding Global Change.

The following anonymous survey is being conducted by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) and should take you less than 15 minutes, but will help hundreds of thousands of educators and students for years to come!

You’ll learn your dog’s cognitive style by playing fun, science-based games –- an experience that gives you the insight you need to make the most of your relationship with your best friend.

A key aspect of the Dognition methodology is our use of Citizen Science – research that can be conducted by everyone, not just people with Ph.D.s. By gathering this data we can begin to understand more about all dogs, much more quickly and on a broader scale than if scientists had to conduct this research themselves.

By just taking photos and observing spiders, you can help the Explorit Science Center learn about which climates certain spiders live in and track the distribution of spiders over time.

Join the Explorit’s Community Science Project by finding and recording spiders in your home or neighborhood (as many as you can!). Use your camera or smart phone to take a photo of the spider and submit it online to add to our geographical database.

Spiders have long been thought of a useful natural method of pest control, but how will expected temperature changes or other environmental changes affect the spider’s usefulness as pest-killers and their distribution?

We don't yet know how climate change will impact spiders, and in turn impact agriculture such as crops and farms- but when we understand where spiders are living today, we will be better able to predict what may happen to spiders and agriculture in the future.

Landmark Trees of India is a documentation, geography, and monitoring project with a focus on famous, remarkable, and heritage trees of India.
India is a country of superlative population, superlative biodiversity, and superlative environmental variety. These landmark trees can teach us about the landscapes, biodiversity, and people of India and the other nations of the world.

Marine Metre Squared (MM2) is an easy way to survey the intertidal community. Monitor a 1m x 1m square patch of your local rocky shore once every season by recording the animals and plants that live there.

Take fun in special scientific studies and fun educational challenges such as hunting for pest species, looking for evidence of animals breeding, and measuring seaweed growth.

Help others identify their new finds with the online forum. Submit your own questions and encourage others around New Zealand to take part.

The perfect project for families looking for holiday activities, schools and community groups looking for ways to engage with and improve their local environments.

The project website and database will be launched during Seaweek (2 - 10 March 2013).

This is a transcription project that aims to transcribe the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection, written in the late 1870's. This collection contains scanned notebooks of |Xam and !Kun languages of the Hunter-Gatherer (Bushman) people of Southern Africa.

uBiome is the world's first effort to map the human microbiome through citizen science.

What's the microbiome? The microbiome are the bacteria that live on and within us. It sounds kind of funny, but all of us are actually covered in helpful germs. Many conditions – from diabetes to depression, asthma to autism -- have been found to relate to the microbiome.

uBiome brings this cutting edge technology directly to consumers for the first time. The more data we collect, the more we can learn about this important area of research. We've been featured so far in Wired, Venture Beat, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, BoingBoing, and more.

Beginning November 14 through the end of the year, students ages 13-18 around the globe are invited to participate in “Data Detectives”, an engaging web experience to learn about how Big Data will impact their lives and the world they will be inheriting.

Data Detectives is the student component of the Human Face of Big Data, a global crowdsourced project conceived by “Day in Life” series creator Rick Smolan. It aims to help people better visualize the ways big data is shaping our future on this planet, and includes a smartphone app, worldwide events, a large format illustrated book with an interactive iPad app, and a documentary.

The Data Detectives initiative invites students to answer questions, explore fascinating examples of how Big Data is changing their world, interact with real-time data and see how other students around the globe are impacted in similar and different ways.

Utah Water Watch (UWW) is a water quality education and data collection program that seeks to increase awareness about the importance of water quality and promote stewardship of Utah’s aquatic resources.

UWW is a partnership between USU Water Quality Extension and the Utah Division of Water Quality that creates a way for the public to help in monitoring Utah’s lakes and streams. This is a free program for volunteers of all ages to monitor water quality once a month and report the data to water managers.

The Bodleian Libraries are enlisting the help of the public in order to improve access to their music collections. Over four thousand digitized scores, mostly piano music from the nineteenth century, many of which have illustrated covers, have now been made available online.

By describing these images, you will not only be helping to provide access to this valuable but hitherto 'hidden' collection, you will also be facilitating future research into popular music of the period and the wider social function which it performed during the Victorian age.

Video games have the potential to do more than entertain. Citizen Sort is taking advantage of this potential by designing video games that make doing science fun.

Citizen Sort is a research project at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York. Students from Syracuse University drew, colored, programmed and coded two unique citizen science video games. They are Forgotten Island and Happy Match.

Happy Match is a twist on the classic matching game. Players will classify photos of animal, plant and insect species that scientists took live in the field. Each round of the game has a different question and players will drag the animal, plant or insect photo into one of the photo answers along the bottom. Scientists wrote the questions in Happy Match based on information they want to know. By classifying the photos, you'll these help scientists as they study the natural world.

Forgotten Island is a point and click adventure game. Players take on the role of a lost adventurer with a secret past. As the player explores the island they meet a suspicious robot spouting orders to re-classify the falling photographs of plant, animal or insect species. The player will also solve puzzles and explore diverse locations from icy peaks to fiery volcanoes.The more classifications a player does, the more money they earn buy items and solve the mystery of Forgotten Island.

Citizen Sort is partially supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant SOCS 09-68470.

eCYBERMISSION is a web-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) competition free for students in grades six through nine where teams can compete for State, Regional and National Awards while working to solve problems in their community. Deadline to sign up: January 15th

eCYBERMISSION challenges you to explore how Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics work in your world.

ZooTeach is a website where teachers and educators can share high quality lesson plans and resources that complement the Zooniverse citizen science projects. Citizen science offers a unique opportunity for any person, of any age, of any background to get involved and make a contribution to cutting edge science. Here at Zooniverse headquarters we believe that getting students involved in citizen science offers educators a free, easily accesible and inspiring opportunity to bring real science into the classroom.

Join thousands of people around the world in a conversation about World Wide Views on Biodiversity. What do you think about the way biodiversity is managed? How do you think we should solve the problem of biodiversity loss? Tell us – and see what others are saying!

On Saturday, September 15, people in over 30 countries joined together for a day of deliberations about these issues. There is still time to add your voice – use the materials on the project's site to learn more about the issue of biodiversity, and then chime in with your ideas. Strike up a conversation with your friends to help inform your decision, or leave a comment to start a discussion with others.

Biodiversity is the species, genetic, and ecosystem diversity in an area, sometimes including associated components such as landscape features or climate. Still feel like you need to know more? You can dive deep into the issues with information from some of the National Research Council’s recent and historic work on the topic. Or skip ahead to the booklet, which all participants in the World Wide Views on Biodiversity deliberations received.
Charge:

Vote to add your voice to the conversation.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needs you to take complex scientific data and images and turn them into informative graphics to convey a simple and easy to understand messages! The JPL’s newest venture is called JPL Infographics, and they need your help to create and post your very own creations of scientific graphic art.

All of the resources are at your fingertips, including high-resolution images, 3-D models, fact sheets, and loads of other data build your very own Infographics. You can browse the numerous of other user creations to get inspired and then upload your creation online!

This is a really fun and challenging project and your work will be used to educate and inform others on the goings on of cutting-edge space exploration. So fire of both sides of your brain and create some educational space art!

Just listen to a few laughs and tell us whether they are real or posed.

The results will help scientists from University College London to understand the way we perceive and react to different sounds. The experiment should take about 10 minutes.

This DIY mapping tool was the first developed by Public Lab, as part of the Grassroots Mapping project. Citizens use helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high resolution “satellite” maps of areas such as in the Gulf Coast and Gowanus Canal. Although this tool has been in use for two years, components of the kit -- kite and balloon design, the rig, the camera -- continue to evolve as they are adopted in new places and adapted for new purposes. Besides the aerial mapping tools, Public Lab has also developed MapKnitter.org, an online tool for stitching aerial images into maps.

Infrared photography can help in assessing plant health, and has been used on satellites and planes for agricultural and ecological assessment primarily by vineyards, large farms and large-scale (read: expensive) research projects. By creating and open-sourcing a low-cost near-infrared camera and working with wetlands advocates, farmers and environmental activists, the Public Lab community has begun to explore grassroots uses for this powerful analytic technique.

The U.S. Geological Survey is asking volunteers to help map man-made structures and facilities, such as schools and fire stations, in the state of Colorado then, in a few months, the United State. Using an internet mapping application, volunteers can help the USGS update The National Map by correcting or adding information about structures nearby.

"Correctly locating and identifying fire stations, police stations, schools, and hospitals not only makes USGS maps more useful, but can literally save a life," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt.

This smartphone app will help you explore habitats in your area and easily monitor wildlife populations by logging locations, photos, and responding to form questions all with the ease of your smartphone.

The National Park Service and National Geographic Society will hold their sixth annual BioBlitz species count from August 24-25 in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Thousands of students, teachers, parents, and other citizen scientists will join about 200 scientists, naturalists, and explorers from around the country to count, collect and analyze important wildlife data to evaluate the biodiversity of the park.

The chloroplasts inside plant cells appear to "clump" together during bacterial infection; this can be devastating for plants and seriously compromise crop yields. We need your help to classify plant cell images by their "clumpiness" in order to further this research.

Helping us to classify the images will give insights into the progression of bacterial infection in plant cells.

What should we do about climate change?

Somehow we have to answer this question. You can help. The Climate CoLab seeks to harness the collective intelligence of contributors from all over the world to develop solutions to the problem of global climate change.

In this online global forum, people can create, analyze and select detailed proposals outlining the actions they believe should be taken to address climate change.

Love tigers? Then connect to wild lives: follow real wild tigers and their cubs, while we keep an eye on them in their jungle homes.

Using cutting-edge ID technology, everyone, guides, naturalists, photographers, conservationists and visitors can all help with your photos and sightings, helping us keep an eye on their last strongholds, and supplying unending dramas in the lives of our wild tigers.

FreeGeek is a nationwide movement that harnesses the power of volunteerism to recycle, rebuilt, and re-sell used computers for the economically underprivileged.

Volunteers receive comprehensive training about how to take apart and rebuild computers as well as how to test and install operating systems.

No formal background in science or computers required, all ages welcome!

Calling all Citizen Scientists to contribute your thoughts to the DEVISE project and help develop tools to measure learning in citizen science! DEVISE (Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments) is an NSF-funded project spearheaded by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A major goal of DEVISE is to help project leaders evaluate the many different ways in which participants learn as they collect, analyze, and manipulate data. We need your feedback to develop tools that can accurately measure outcomes related to science and environmental interest, knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Participating in this project is easy – just follow the link "get started now" above right, and give your thoughts on topics such as the Nature of Science, Motivation, Science Inquiry Skills, and Environmental Stewardship. There are no right or wrong answers - we just want your opinions.
Simply click the Join In tab above or the Get Started button to the right!

Invasive species are a growing global concern because of their negative impacts on ecosystem functions and biodiversity. American shad are an andaromous (ascend rivers from the ocean to spawn) fish native to the Atlantic coast of North America that were deliberately introduced to the Sacramento River, CA, in 1871. The species has now spread to additional Pacific coastal rivers, and have dramatically increased in abundance in the some systems like the Columbia River.

Despite their prevelance in the Pacific northwest, basic information about the ecological effects of shad on native species remain unknown. A first step towards gaining an understanding of the species impacts requires knowing where they continue to be found.

eButterfly is a citizen science project that helps document butterflies in Canada. By creating a user profile and documenting observed butterflies, citizens can help scientists better understand butterfly distribution in Canada. Users can also track which butterflies they have observed on a dynamic map application, and share photos with the eButterfly community.

The 2,045 eButterfly records of over 170 species help the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research at the University of Ottawa's Department of Biology better understand how butterflies adapt to environmental change. Eventually, the data you collect will help contribute to the preservation of Canada’s great biodiversity.

Solitary bees and wasps in your own backyard!!!

Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping (and wasp-keeping!).

Here at University of Florida Native Buzz you can keep track of your own native buzz nest site and see the results of other participant’s nest sites.

How much will the ground shake when your students take part in the Big Cheer on April 27, 2012 at 1:30pm ET (10:30am PT)?

Join the Big Cheer for Science on April 27, 2012 at 1:30 pm ET, presented by SciStarter, Science Cheerleader, USGS, the Iris Consortium, Discover Magazine and the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Anchored at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC, this one minute cheer will include plenty of stomping and shaking in an effort to get kids jazzed about science AND measure seismic activity caused by their cheer!

Liven up your classroom with a cheer that students do standing next to their desks.

In Washington, DC, dozens of Science Cheerleaders (scientists and engineers--who also happen to be cheerleaders for the Redskins, Wizards and Ravens among other NFL and NBA teams) will lead a one minute cheer for science with 10,000 students at the DC Convention center. While we're doing the cheer in DC, hundreds of schools across the country will do the same cheer at the same time.

During the cheer, you can have your students record your local ground movement during the Big Cheer and share it with other participating schools for comparison. Comparisons can be further made to how much the ground shakes during the Big Cheer at the Washington D.C. Convention Center and in your classroom and to how much it shakes during an actual earthquake.

To join the Big Cheer, click on the Join In tab above or the "Get Started" button to the right!

To learn about hundreds of other research projects in need of help from the public, check out the SciStarter Project Finder: http://scistarter.com/finder.

GOOOO SCIENCE and ENGINEERING!

FieldScope is a community web-mapping tool that promotes student engagement as citizen scientists and involves them in learning through mapping. By combining easy data integration with powerful mapping visualization, FieldScope is on the cutting edge of community mapping.

The application is accessed online and is requires no installation. Students are able to upload field data photos and other media as well as collaborate with other students and scientists, and perform analysis on existing data. There are many rich projects to choose from, including mapping water quality in the Chesapeake Bay, investigating watershed dynamics, and mapping rivers and streams in the National Parks.

With students able to contribute and interact alongside scientists, meaningful science is sure to happen!

THE BROAD PICTURE: The aim of MammalMAP is to update the distribution records of all African mammal species. Through collaborations with professional scientists, conservation organisations, wildlife authorities and citizen scientists across Africa, we consolidate all reliable and identifiable evidence (camera trap records, photographs) of current mammal locations into an open-access digital database. The database software automatically generates online distribution maps of all recorded species which are instantly visible and searchable. The information consolidated within MammalMAP will not only yield crucial information for species conservation policies and landscape conservation policies, but provides an excellent platform for educating the public about African mammals and their conservation challenges.

WHY MAMMALMAP IS NECESSARY: In Africa, our knowledge of mammal distribution patterns is based largely on historical records. However, the last three centuries have seen extensive human-modification of African landscapes with the associated conversion, compression and fragmentation of natural land. With further land development presenting a likely reality for the future, the effectiveness of mammal conservation efforts depends on ecological records being updated so that they accurately reflect mammal distribution patterns in the 21st Century. With MammalMAP we plan to conduct these ecological updates over the coming years, by mapping the current distribution of mammal species (including marine mammals and small mammals) across Africa.

HOW MAMMALMAP CONTRIBUTES TO CONSERVATION: The conservation benefits of this research are multiple. First, the comparison of these updated distribution records with both historical and future records will enable the detection of species’ distribution changes in response to human-related and climate-related habitat changes. These change detections will assist the guidance of continent-wide conservation policies and decision making processes. Second, the research will promote and facilitate interdisciplinary and international collaboration amongst scientists and conservation practitioners, with potential benefits to the advancement of conservation science. Finally, both the project input stage (data collection) and output stage (data dissemination) will offer interactive, dynamic and widely applicable education tools suitable for both formal and informal education sectors.

THE WHERE AND THE HOW OF MAMMALMAP: The area of interest for MammalMAP is the whole of Africa. To achieve this we collaborate with scientists, conservation organisations, wildlife authorities and citizen scientists across the continent. Our methods involve consolidating evidence of mammal occurrence in a given location (camera trap records, photographs and other reliable records) into a digital database hosted by the Animal Demography Unit (ADU) at the University of Cape Town. In time, we will use the records in the database to generate distribution maps for all recorded species, in the same way that the ADU has done for birds, reptiles, frogs and butterflies.

In order to conduct a large-scale survey of urban spiders, we need the help of the public. We are asking people to collect spiders in their homes and gardens, fill out a simple data sheet about their collection, and send or bring the spiders and forms to the Natural History Museum.

In spite of their importance and abundance, we do not know much about the spiders in Los Angeles. There are no truly large collections of urban spiders from this area, as most collectors concentrate on studying natural areas.

As an important international port, new species of spiders from various parts of the world are always being accidentally introduced into the Los Angeles area, and some of these have established breeding populations. We need to know how widespread these introduced species have become, and how they have interacted with the native spiders. Also, we want to know how urbanization and the loss of natural habitat has affected populations and distributions of naturally occurring spiders.

Welcome to a world where very small changes in a person's DNA can have a huge impact on how they perceive taste.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is conducting a live research study, Genetics of Taste: A Flavor for Health, happening right now in the permanent exhibit Expedition Health. The Genetics Lab is the first community-based and community-run genetics lab in the country.

Why not have a bit of fun with the Museum's vision "to create a community of critical thinkers" and let the community take the wheel and drive a real research project. With that, our study on taste and health was born, and supported by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Our community is involved in three unique ways:

1. The research questions were chosen by the public through town hall meetings and audience surveys.

2. The study is carried out by NIH-certified volunteer citizen-scientists.

3. Guests are enrolled as subjects into our study to allow every aspect of our community to participate in the project.

What is enrollment you ask?

We use a series of simple, but highly specific tests that are both fun and informative:

1. The first data collections station is to collect cheek cells from the guest using a small gentle brush (WARNING- this step kind of tickles). Those cells are then busted open (more to come on this process!) and the DNA is examined.

2. The next step is a taste test: will you be able to taste the bitter compound? Some people can, some people can't and some people taste it REALLY well!

3. The third station is the TANITA. A really fancy scale that measures all kinds of cool information about your body- all of which guest get to take home.

4. Finally, drum roll please…. We stain your tongue blue! Even though this station is super fun for our guest, it's also really important for us in Lab Central. You see, while the tongue stains blue, the taste buds stay pink, so we can take a super close-up scientific picture to count them.

Then we use the latest and greatest new Polaroid camera (prints right from the camera!) to take a fun photo of our guest to take home with them. Spoiler alert, the picture is also a sticker, how fun is that?

So here's the main point of all this chatting: through community participation in authentic research, the Genetics of Taste study increases public understanding of genetic research, while also making strides to better understand the genetic ancestry of the gene that dictates the ability to taste bitter, Tas2r38, and its affect on the health of modern day humans.

The Wolbachia Project brings real-world biology research into high school and undergraduate classrooms to empower students with science.

Mission

The four core goals of this initiative are:

1. Engage citizen scientists in nature and real-world research

2. Encourage international participation in the collection of new scientific data on Wolbachia bacteria that live inside insects and other arthropods

3. Enhance interest in science through an integrative lab series spanning biodiversity to molecular biology

4. Give people an idea of what it's like to be a scientist.

Outline:

In this integrative lab series, you will collect insects and other arthropods in your local area, identify the organism using an online key, extract DNA from the animal, use biotechnology techniques to test for the presence of Wolbachia bacteria in your samples. You will also be able to send your sample to a research institute that will sequence the Wolbachia DNA so you can do a bioinformatic / phylogenetic analysis of the Wolbachia symbiont.

By 1900, Trumpeter Swans were extirpated from their nesting and wintering areas in Central and Eastern North America. Their historic migrations to southerly wintering sites were totally destroyed. In recent decades wild nesting populations of Trumpeters have been successfully restored in several northerly states and Ontario. Most swans now winter near their northern breeding areas, but an unknown number are pioneering southward where they are beginning to establish use of more southerly wintering sites.

Little is known regarding the numbers and groupings of southward migrants, the location and characteristics of the sites they are pioneering, the duration of use, or problems they may be encountering. By providing information through Trumpeter Watch, observers can help document the changing distribution of wintering Trumpeter Swans and help identify potential new southerly wintering sites.

Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of spring through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events. Find migration maps, pictures, standards-based lesson plans, activities and information to help students make local observations and fit them into a global context. Widely considered a best-practices model for education, Journey North is the nation's premiere "citizen science" project for children. The general public is welcome to participate.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is offering a new online
course for educators focused on its successful citizen science program – *PBB
- 501 Project BudBurst: Introduction to Plant Phenology and Climate Change.
* This inaugural offering is *being offered at no charge *to K-12 educators
and is suited for both formal and informal educational settings. This
online course provides all needed information to implement Project BudBurst
(www.budburst.org) in the classroom and engage your students in a national
program by learning more about plants and climate change at a local level.

Act now and be part of the first online course from The BudBurst Academy
that begins on February 15 and take advantage of the *registration fee
being waived*.

Involvement in Project BudBurst will give students valuable experience
collecting data and will give them the opportunity to make meaningful
contributions to ongoing scientific research where scientists are very
interested in the observations students across the county are making.

This professional development course will provide you with detailed
information on Project BudBurst and how to participate including how to
select your plants and make observations, suggestions for structuring your
classroom involvement, classroom activities to engage your students in
making observations, analyzing data, as well as forming a community with
other K-12 educators within Project BudBurst.

Participants in PBB - 501 can sign up for optional graduate level
continuing education credits from Colorado School of Mines. The fee for 2
credits is $90.00

More information can be found at www.budburst.org/academy

Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, terabytes of video footage and photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP's DeepWorker sub pilots. This data must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like "how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?" and "why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?". But before these questions can be answered, all the data must be analyzed.

Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that need intensive computational power. The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing Distributed Computation capability using BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing).

Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering, idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to university projects. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others' simulation by its own solutions.

The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!

We are currently seeking research assistants to join our field team in Ecuador studying the conservation ecology of reptiles and amphibians.

While Ecuador is a relatively small country—it’s roughly the size of Arizona—it stands as the third most diverse country in the world for amphibians (510 species) and is seventh for reptiles (430 species), making it a herpetologically mega-diverse region. Due to the severe deforestation taking place in addition to many other pressures on Ecuador’s fauna, RAEI’s research program aims to study, document, and preserve these rich and unique communities of reptiles and amphibians found within the country’s diverse array of ecosystems.

As we are now in our 8th year working in Ecuador, we have study sites encompassing both the coastal forests in western Ecuador and the Amazon rainforest on the eastern side of the Andes Mountains. The work that research participants will be involved with will primarily consist of conducting night surveys for reptiles and amphibians (however other taxa such as invertebrates are also of interest), animal data collection, and lab work. Lab work consists of more detailed information such as scale counts (for reptiles) and other morphological information, animal measurements, screening for chytrid desease (amphibians), preservation (only when necessary), and acquisition of DNA samples. Diagnostic photographs of all animals are taken. Other tasks include animal handling and general note taking and data organization.

SingAboutScience has a searchable database which teachers and others can use to find content-rich songs on specific scientific and mathematical topics. Finding and cataloguing all relevant songs is a challenge, however, and volunteers can be used to help with this. Other possible work might entail technical development of the website and assessment of its usability.

Science Hack Day is a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building 'cool stuff'. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It's time for a Hack Day focused on science!

Do you know what bugs are living near you? Take part in OPAL Bugs Count and discover the incredible variety of invertebrates that make their home around us.

Bugs, or invertebrates, are a vital part of our environment. They can pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, and they provide an important food source for birds and mammals.

Find as many bugs as you can in our timed challenges and keep a special eye out for the six Species Quest bugs.

Your findings will help scientists learn more about the distribution of invertebrates across the country and how the urban environment may be affecting them.

STE - Scuba Tourism for the Environment is aimed at obtaining information on the Red Sea marine biodiversity state, by collaborating with volunteer dive tourists.

In this way the research can provide the institutions with tools to implement conservation and preservation measures, and at the same time it contributes to the development of ecotourism in the area, providing the tourists with a discerning, active and useful way to increase their naturalistic awareness and recreational value of their holidays.

EcoSpark's Changing Currents program introduces grade 8-12 students from across the Greater Toronto Area (Toronto, Peel, Durham, and York school boards) to their area's watersheds. Students get outside, put on hip waders, explore a local river stream, and learn about its importance and quality.

By participating in the program students will:

use benthic macro-invertebrate bio-monitoring to examine the health of their local river or stream (it's easy!),
contribute to a GTA-wide study of watersheds, and
have the chance to take action around what they discover

The American Chestnut Foundation has several efforts underway to help restore the American Chestnut tree. There are many ways to get involved as a citizen scientist:

1. Hiking and counting American chestnuts. We have a few upcoming training events, usually all done by the end of June. We've been concentrating on the Appalachian Trail, but hope to expand the project beyond there.

2. Planting breeding orchards / germplasm conservation orchards of American chestnuts: Involves planting chestnut trees, maintaining the planting, and sending yearly measurements to our central office.

3. Breeding / Harvesting chestnut trees: Involved finding American chestnuts on which to breed, following their flowering, and performing controlled pollinations on the trees through the end of June and beginning of July. Follow-up during harvest in September and October is the final step. Harvesting can be done on it's own without controlled pollinations

4. Participating in the data collection, testing and selection of advanced breeding materials. If one does not want to plant their own orchard, we hope to match interested people with current growers to help maintain and collect data on orchards already in place.

5. Outreach liaison: More of an outreach position, and potentially less of a citizen science position, but we have continuing need for folks to learn about our program and give presentations to various groups - anyone from girl scouts to Audubon groups and Lions' Clubs - anything of that ilk.

The Seeker, Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N), is looking for approaches to using games and/or game dynamics applications to inspire adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease and other chronic illnesses to create and maintain their own health.

Project Calliope is an upcoming orbiting satellite that will convert Earth's ionosphere to music for people to share. Calliope lets people get a sense of how active space is. Calliope will measure the ionosphere for its 12-week life and transmit that data as sonified MIDI data (akin to sheet music) so anyone with a ham radio or web connection can listen to it-- or remix it into their own music compositions. It is planned to launch into orbit in late 2011.

Get a snapshot of the health of the Boise River watershed by monitoring water quality! Citizen groups, schools, families, and individuals are invited to participate in this fun event which takes place at numerous sites along the Boise River and tributaries from Lucky Peak to Star. No experience necessary! A knowledgeable trainer will meet you at your assigned location to assist with monitoring.

Plant a lilac or a dogwood and contribute to a phenology monitoring project over 50 years in existence! While the dogwood will soon be added to the Cloned Plants Project, the root of the USA-NPN Cloned Plants Project is the historic cloned lilac project. Participants plant a lilac clone and record observations of recurring life cycle stages such as leafing and flowering via the USA-NPN webpage. Observations of cloned plants made over large geographical regions are valuable in predicting crop yields and bloom dates of other species, controlling insect and disease infestations, and assisting with monitoring the impact of global climate change.

The cloned lilac available through the USA-NPN is Syringa x chinensis, 'Red Rothomagensis'. The cloned dogwood soon available is Cornus florida, ‘Appalachian Spring’. Generally, lilacs grow throughout the northern and central US, while dogwoods are better grown by observers in the southeast and gulf states. Review the purchase options on our website, and once you have received your cloned plant, check the information on selecting a site for planting and how to take care of your cloned plant. Cloned plant phenology is observed and recorded using the monitoring instructions found on the How to Observe page and using the details on the plant profile page.

Digitalkoot needs volunteers to fix mistakes in the index of old Finnish newspapers. And you do this by playing games! Your participation will greatly increase the accuracy of text-based searches of the newspaper archives.

Most of the information in the National Library of Finland's newspaper archives has already been copied into computer databases using computerized text recognition. The problem is that computers fail to recognize all the words. Especially when the quality of the source material is poor, the results need to be fixed by hand. This requires a lot of manual work.

The goal of the project is to index the National Library of Finland's enormous archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access Finland's cultural heritage.

Digitalkoot is run by the National Library of Finland and Microtask.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an online, collaborative project where you can learn about any species on Earth, as well as contribute information and submit photos. This global initiative seeks to create an "infinitely expandable" resource for all of our planet’s 1.9 million known species.

The Encyclopedia of Life draws from existing databases, such as AmphibiaWeb and Mushroom Observer, and sponsorship from a number of leading scientific organizations. The scientific community and general public can contribute to this growing body of knowledge by posting images to the Flikr group and adding tags and text comments to any species page. In addition, citizen naturalists with a demonstrated commitment to quality science can apply to become curators who are responsible for maintaining the project's vetted content.

The OPAL Biodiversity Survey needs citizen scientists in England to help uncover the diverse range of wildlife in hedges. By contributing, you'll help researchers learn more about the importance of hedges and how we can improve them.

Hedges support many animals by providing them with food and shelter. Berries and seeds are food for birds, while holes beneath the hedge are often home to small mammals. You’ll also discover caterpillars, shieldbugs and many other invertebrates living among the leaves.

By sharing your observations with the project, reseachers can instantly rate the condition of your hedge and offer suggestions on how to improve it.

This is one of five OPAL surveys across England to learn more about the state of the environment. Anyone can get involved. The studies are open to all ages and abilities, and your contribution will be important in helping scientists build up a picture of England's natural environment.

Wildlife Health Event Reporter (WHER) is an online, experimental reporting system for reporting and sharing the sightings of sick or dead wildlife.

Individual reports viewed together can lead to the detection and containment of wildlife disease outbreaks that may pose a health risk to people, domestic animals and other wildlife. For smart phone users, the HealthMap mobile phone application, Outbreaks Near Me, is also available. It captures the same information that the web-based WHER application collects and allows users to upload photos. WHER hopes to harness the power of the many eyes of the public to better detect wildlife disease phenomenon.

Additionally, WHER was developed by the Wildlife Data Integration Network (WDIN), a program of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in partnership with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

PowerSleuth meets PowerMeter invites teachers and students in Maine to examine electricity data and help homeowners monitor how much electricity they’re using while they’re using it.

You’ll engage in a series of investigations and activities using these new tools and other resources to answer questions about home electricity use. Along the way you’ll learn more about electricity - how it’s measured, how customers are charged for their use and how much electricity common household appliances use. As you engage in this work, be sure to keep a good science notebook; record your ideas, what you’re finding out, and the new questions you have. You’ll use your findings to make recommendations for conserving electricity.

Electricity is one of the few things we use first and pay for later. Throughout the month people use electricity in their homes for many different things. At the end of the month, the homeowner receives a bill for the total amount of electricity used during the previous month. The appliances in our homes aren’t marked with price tags so we don’t know as we turn them on them how much electricity they use. Another thing that makes it difficult to keep track of how much electricity our homes are using is we can’t see electricity!

Join the PowerSleuth Meets PowerMeter project and learn a few simple things you and your family can do to save energy.

Let's get started!

The Master Watershed Steward program trains citizens across the state of Arizona to serve as volunteers in the protection, restoration, monitoring, and conservation of their water and watersheds.

We all live in a watershed, also known as a drainage basin or catchment. Each watershed is defined by an area of land that drains water downhill into a common water body. The health of watersheds is especially impacted as our growing population, and thus our demand for natural resources, increases. Learning to look past political boundaries and view land as divided by natural boundaries helps us better manage resources as a complete, more sustainable system.

As a Master Watershed Steward you can help to improve the health of your watershed. The project's informative, research-based training will give you the knowledge to make better, more informed decisions related to your own land, community and watershed. Master Watershed Stewards are highly trained volunteers working closely with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Stewards may come from a variety of backgrounds, but all have a passion for our environment! To become certified, Master Watershed Stewards participate in over 40 hours of course and field work to learn the basics of watershed science.

You work with community organizations including watershed partnerships and various state agencies to implement projects throughout Arizona to monitor, maintain and restore the health of our watersheds. Ongoing volunteer projects include: photopoint monitoring in the Tonto National Forest and Saguaro National Park, riparian assessments along urban and preserved corridors, outreach at Arizona Project WET Water Festivals, free private well testing and collaboration with NEMO to develop Watershed Based Plans.

The Master Watershed Steward Program is a partnership of the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality's Water Quality Division.

iSpot is a unique website where you can get the help of a friendly community to identify anything living that you have seen in nature. We are based in the UK, but observations from elsewhere are welcome.

You can add an observation to the website, suggest an identification, or see if anyone else can identify an observation for you.

Help others by adding an identification to an existing observation. Your reputation on the site will grow as others with knowledge agree with you identifications.

Ultimately, the data collected on iSpot are added to a central depository of biodiversity data held by the National Biodiversity Network

We have online keys (also available via web browsers on cell phones) that are designed to help you identify certain groups of species.

What are you waiting for? Get outside and make some observations. :)

The Community Foundation of North Louisiana is focused on helping improve the reading proficiency of elementary (primary) school students in their community. Historically this region of the country has frequently fallen short of the standards set by the rest of the country and they are looking to InnoCentive’s dynamic Solver community to gain new insights and solutions. Many more details are available within the Challenge. This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution.

Educators and non profit groups can create and manage their own citizen science class activity or projects with easy to use free online tools.

Create a citizen science project in minutes and avoid costly development costs.

Eye on Earth brings together scientific information on air and water quality with feedback and observations from millions of ordinary people. You'll be able to view air and bathing water quality for the majority of Europe as well as provide your own feedback.

Eye on Earth represents a partnership between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency. It includes information on the water quality for more than 22,000 bathing sites throughout Europe. It also includes information on air quality for more than 1,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout Europe.

Over five years, the site will grow to include information on many other environmental topics and turn into a global observatory for environmental change. It will broaden the thematic spectrum of environmental information by integrating prominent environmental challenges of our times, such as ground level ozone and other forms of air pollution, oil sills, biodiversity, and coastal erosion.

Join the fun!

Maryland Science Center's Communicating Climate Change project needs volunteers to take temperature measurements across the urban-rural gradient. The study will look at Urban Heat Islands, which provide a glimpse of what the world will look like with warmer temperatures.

The Urban Heat Island Effect describes the temperature difference between a metropolitan area and the more rural landscape nearby. The Urban Heat Effect is not an effect of climate change, but rather of human activity shaping our environment. One may ask, if we can make changes on a local scale, are we also responsible for changes globally?

The Maryland Science Center and our research partners at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study are proud to join eleven science centers across the nation in the Association of Science and Technology Center’s C3: Communicating Climate Change Citizen Science project.

You too can be a scientist and take part a long term research study!

There is no geographic or age restriction on participation.

CitSci.org is a platform that supports a variety of citizen science programs using a centralized database to store and deliver science data, with a focus on community based monitoring programs. This platform allows program coordinators to create their own projects and datasheets, manage members, define measurements, create analyses, and even write feedback forms.

The Great Lakes Worm Watch needs citizen scientists to conduct earthworm surveys in forests and other habitats anywhere in North America.

Earthworms are not native to the Great Lakes Region; they were all wiped out after the last glaciation. The current population, brought here by early Europeans, is slowly changing the face of our native forests, but very little is known about the distributions of earthworm and earthworm species across the region. While valuable, this type of information is labor-intensive, and it is difficult for researchers to get funding to do this kind of work. Citizen scientists can help.

There are several ways to get involved:

1. Document earthworm occurrences: This involves collecting and sending earthworm specimens with location information to Great Lakes Worm Watch. These specimens will be archived at the University of Minnesota, and the species and location information will be added to the project database.

2. Collect habitat data: Great Lakes Worm Watch would like data from all habitat types, especially natural ecosystems like forests, woodlands, and prairies. In addition, data from habitats dominated by human activity are also of value, such as farm fields, pastures, and parks. Depending on your level of interest and expertise, you can choose to conduct a general or detailed habitat survey. You can use the instructions and data sheets developed by the project coordinators to make the data easily transferable to the database.

3. Conduct soil surveys: In addition to earthworm and habitat data, Great Lakes Worm Watch is also interested in getting data about the soil conditions at sites in which you sampled for earthworms. You can use the instructions and data sheet developed by project coordinators to make the data easily transferable to the database.

Get started! Anyone can make a BIG difference when it comes to containing the spread of exotic earthworms!

SoundCitizen is a community-based water sampling network in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We’d love your help.

SoundCitizen focuses on scientific investigation and knowledge discovery of the chemical links between urban settings and aquatic systems. We study fun compounds (cooking spices) and serious ones (emerging pollutants).

We are staffed by undergraduate students at the University of Washington, whose individual research topics help define the overall scientific aims of the program.

SoundCitizen encourages involvement with citizen volunteers and school groups, who voluntarily collect water samples from aquatic systems, perform a series of simple chemical tests, and then mail samples to the lab to be analyzed for cooking spices and emerging pollutants. Our scientific findings illustrate strong seasonal links between household activities (cooking, cleaning etc.) and the subsequent release of chemical “fingerprints” of these activities in aquatic and marine environments.

The Mastodon Matrix Project needs citizen volunteers to analyze actual samples of matrix (the dirt) from a 14,000 year old mastodon excavated in New York! Learn the process of science and work like a paleontologist on real research material!

Volunteers sort through the matrix to find shells, bones, hair, pieces of plants, and rocks from the time when the mastodons lived and roamed the Earth. The matrix and discoveries are then sent back to the Paleontological Research Institution, where they will be cataloged and further analyzed by paleontologists to help scientists form a true picture of the ecology and environment of the late Pleistocene.

Mastodons are extinct relatives of modern elephants. Mastodons were numerous and widespread in North America up until around 10,000 years ago, when they became extinct--with many other species--at the end of the last glacial period.

Physics Songs aims to be the world's premier website devoted to collecting and organizing all songs about physics. It is managed by Walter F. Smith, Professor of Physics at Haverford College.

Songs about physics can help students to remember critical concepts and formulas, but perhaps more importantly they communicate the lesson that physics can be fun. They certainly help to establish an informal classroom atmosphere, in which even shy students are willing to ask questions.

The songs may also activate a different part of the students' brains.

Six out of 10 people in the US have never seen our Milky Way Galaxy arch across their night sky from where they live. And the problem of light pollution is quickly getting worse. Within a couple of generations in the U.S., only the national parks will have dark enough skies to see the Milky Way.

Too much outdoor lighting not only affects being able to see the stars, but also wastes energy and money, about 2 to 10 billion dollars a year. And it has been shown to cause sleep disorders in people and to disrupt the habits of animals like newly hatched sea turtles that try to find their way back into the ocean but are disoriented by streetlights.

Light pollution may be a global problem, but the solutions are local. To help people “see the light”, an international star-hunting program for students, teachers, and the general public was created called GLOBE at Night. GLOBE at Night is now in its 5th year and is hosted by the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

There are 5 GLOBE at Night campaigns in 2013:
January 3 - 12
January 31 - February 9
March 3 - 12
March 31 - April 9
April 29 - May 8

Through this program, children and adults are encouraged to reconnect with the night sky and learn about light pollution and in doing so, become citizen scientists inspired to protect this natural resource. Teachers like the GLOBE at Night program, because it lends itself to cross-curricular learning: astronomy, geography, history, literature, and writing. The possibilities are great.

Are you interested in bringing Hubble Space Telescope data into your classroom? Then check out NASA Top Stars!

U.S. formal (K-12 and college) and informal educators were invited to submit their best examples of using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope for science, technology, engineering or mathematics education. Those selected as Top Stars received national recognition and awards. Winning entries are published online for other educators to use to inspire their students.

The deadline to enter was Feb. 28, 2010. While the contest has ended, the Top Stars website provides access to a showcase of Top Stars winners and other resources for the classroom.

Top Stars is an IGES initiative, through funding from NASA, and in cooperation with the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Find and photograph ladybugs! Join us in finding out where all the ladybugs have gone, so we can try to prevent more native species from becoming so rare.

Across North America, ladybug species distribution is changing. Over the past twenty years, several native ladybugs that were once very common have become extremely rare. During this same time, ladybugs from other places have greatly increased both their numbers and range. Some ladybugs are simply found in new places.

This is happening very quickly and we don’t know how, or why, or what impact it will have on ladybug diversity or the role that ladybugs play in keeping plant-feeding insect populations low.

EnvironMentors provides mentors to high school students from under-represented backgrounds for college degree programs in environmental and related science fields. The program matches minority high school students with college and university faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and science and environmental professionals, in one-to-one mentoring relationships. Working together, students and mentors develop rigorous environmental science research projects over the course of the academic year.

In the spring, EnvironMentors students present their projects to elementary school classes in their respective school districts and to a team of judges at each chapter's EnvironMentors Fair. The top three students from each chapter travel to Washington, D.C., to present their project at the National EnvironMentors Fair.

EnvironMentors' integrative approach to identifying pressing environmental issues through hands-on application of the scientific method supported by a mentor has proven beneficial all students and life-changing for some.