#scistarter

April is #CitizenScience Month. Help SciStarter by participating in 2.5 Million #ActsOfScience

Help scientists analyze movies from the brain affected with Alzheimer’s - are the blood vessels flowing or stalled? To fully understand how stalls are contributing to Alzheimer’s and discover potential treatment targets, we need to get through lots of data. We need your keen eyes for that. Join us on April 16th, 2026 for Game Night for Science: Play Stall Catchers Online!

Public science (or citizen science) is looked down on for letting amateurs participate, guide, or even form and control the entirety of projects and research - but nothing quite screams the future of science and collective action quite like this.

Take the Philly Unleaded Project, for example:

In the winter of 2015, “Jonathan King and Tony Spagnoli – a patent attorney and an urban planner, respectively – launched the Philly Unleaded Project, a not-for-profit organization that provides kits to Philadelphia residents who would like to test their water independently of the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD).  They launched their organization as the city council began to investigate how the PWD instructed residents to test their own water supplies, amid concerns that these instructions do not provide accurate measures of lead levels. The PWD now faces a class-action lawsuit over these testing methodologies and other allegations.”

SciStarter.org

We are all invited!  April is Citizen Science Month, and there are SO many projects you can join, right now, and start contributing.  

Begin @ SciStarter.org.   Not certain of the benefits for science? For yourself? For humanity and all of creation?  These books will convince you.  Now on display in the science library (and that’s not all! Come visit to see the rest):

Okay, so some projects could involve hip boots and a nifty net for catching flying insects, but there is so much more!  Explore the possibilities at SciStarter.org - you will be inspired.

Book covers shown above, in order:  

Handbook of Citizen Science in Conservation and Ecology

Citizen Science : How Ordinary People are Changing the Face of Discovery

Enhancing STEM Motivation Through Citizen Science Projects 

Happy Citizen Science Day!

Join members of the public in taking part in scientific research as part of Citizen Science Day.

Sponsored by the Citizen Science Association, with support from SciStarter, Citizen Science Day is an annual event to celebrate and promote citizen science, science done by members of the public, often under the direction of a professional scientist or scientific institution. Find a citizen science event near you or learn about online events here. To learn more about the day, check out this Science NetLinks blog post from 2017.

If you aren't able to take part in Citizen Science Day events, mark your calendar for the City Nature Challenge, April 27–May 3. This event is taking place in more than 60 cities across the country and invites citizen scientists to photograph or identify local plants and animals.

Are you a citizen scientist AND a logophile? Love to connect data with dynamic narrative - or maybe just a good science story? Some may think language and science are disconnected but we don't! 

Neither does SciStarter - today they've included the TC in their newsletter along with Notes from Nature, Mark2Cure, Ignore That! and The Verb Corner in their newsletter. Read more about these projects, along with the links to get started, here: http://bit.ly/1TqzGuN