This month it’s exceptionally easy to celebrate by simply grabbing your meal and bringing it outside! Lots of creatures will likely join you during your meal en plein air, so this is a good opportunity to say hello and take note as some sing you songs, some attempt to take a nibble of your food… and others yet who may attempt to take a nibble of you! While you’re enjoying the fresh air, here are six citizen science projects that you can d ...read more

Hitting the trails for the long holiday weekend? Here’s a citizen science project you can contribute if you’re exploring the Appalachian Mountains, which stretch all the way from Georgia to Maine. Happy trails!  ~The SciStarter Editorial Team Hikers in the Appalachian mountains contribute data and help researchers learn how climate change is affecting plants living in high Alpine ranges and promote conservation in the face of these changes. Lea ...read more

The sight of dozens of butterflies congregated in one spot might be beautiful, but if you know what they're actually doing, you might not want to get too close. When butterflies get together like this, it's usually to slurp up some nutritional goodies from an unexpected source—like, oh I don't know, animal pee. This behavior is often called "puddling" or "mudding", though the insects don't just suck on damp earth. To get missing nutrients like sodium which aren't& ...read more

Ever since Rob Weryk first spotted ‘Oumuamua zipping through the solar system in October 2017, the peculiar object has been the target of intense scrutiny for astronomers from around the globe. After confirming the suspected asteroid reached a maximum speed of nearly 200,000 miles per hour during its closest approach to the Sun (and is shaped like a cigar), researchers quickly shifted their focus to determining the composition and origin of this mysteri ...read more

Hello friends! After 8 years and 679 posts, the time has come for me to wrap up this blog. Most cephalopods don't live more than a year or two, so I've been very lucky. I started Inkfish when I was working as a magazine editor; I wanted an outlet to share scientific stories that excited me with my friends and family, and maybe—I hoped—some other readers. Later I moved from good old Blogspot to the blog network Field of Science, and  ...read more

When you think of Mozart, you probably imagine an 18th century gentleman who was always thinking about music. Well, it turns out that when not composing musical masterpieces, Mozart liked to talk about "shooting off his rear-end gun".  He was such a huge fan of potty humor that some historians, after reading a series of letters that Mozart wrote to his female cousin (the Bäsle letters), have proposed that he&A ...read more