Join the global movement.
Citizen science provides many ways to explore topics you are curious or concerned about, from anywhere in the world.
Find a project near you using the SciStarter Project Finder. Enable the “near me” feature to find local projects in need of your help.
Below, we highlight projects and outcomes from every continent.
Cheers!The SciStarter Team
Citizen Science in North America
Ian Davies, a 26-year-old bird watcher in Canada, report ...read more
One of the best known of all neuroscience studies is the 'free will experiment' conducted by Benjamin Libet and colleagues in 1983.
Libet et al. asked volunteers to tap their fingers at will, freely choosing the time of each action. EEG revealed an electrical potential occuring "several hundred milliseconds" before people reported a conscious decision to perform each tap.
This "Readiness Potential" or Bereitschaftspotential threatened to debunk the very existence of human volition. Libet' ...read more
As the interviewer and the author of this post, I’ll reveal my bias now: meeting Michelle Neil, the secretary and social media moderator of the Australian Citizen Science Association, was a highlight of the Citizen Science Association’s conference for me. I’m an unabashed Michelle fan. She sat down with me this past March in Raleigh for a wide-ranging discussion of how she got into citizen science, citizen science in Australia, and her future plans for this work. Michelle wrote ...read more
A small segment of the population are born with superhuman sleep needs. They're called natural short sleepers, and they wake up refreshed and wide awake on very little sleep. And these individuals share a few other quirks, too. (Credit: Shutterstock)
What do Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Martha Stewart have in common? They’re part of the 1 percent.
No, not that one percent. Instead, we’re referring to the one percent of people who thrive on far less sleep than what is reco ...read more
A recently captured view of Saturn’s rings shows them glowing brightly on June 20, 2019. Hubble took this stunning shot as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL Team)
Saturn’s rings are one of the most striking celestial features in our solar system. The Pioneer and Voyager probes gave us our first close-up look. More recently, NASA’s Cassini mission spent ...read more
Feeling stressed yet? (Credit: boyhey/Shutterstock)
It's happened to all of us. You're out and about when you notice that your phone is running low on battery. For many, the realization sparks a sense of urgency, and lends new meaning to plans we may have already laid. Edging that battery icon back up becomes a goal of singular urgency, a task that lends a frisson of unease to our everyday lives.
At least, that's what two researchers in Europe found when they surveyed a small group of Lon ...read more
(Credit: lzf/Shutterstock)
(Inside Science) -- Millions of years ago, after the ancestors of humans diverged from the last link they shared with chimpanzees, they began developing the numerous adaptations that made endurance one of the defining traits of our species. By about 2 million years ago, the genus Homo had emerged and the process really took off. Today, humans can run for miles or walk all day thanks to those changes. In new research, scientists have shown just how substant ...read more
(Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti)
Some 30 million light-years from Earth, a faint monster lurks in the constellation Cetus the Whale. Astronomers dub the object UGC 695, and astronomers recently caught this image of it using the Hubble Space Telescope.
It’s a galaxy fainter than even the background brightness of our planet’s atmosphere, which makes it tough to see with Earth-bound telescopes.
These so-called “low-surface-brightness galaxies” get thei ...read more
A true color approximation of Jupiter's moon Io taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1999. (credit: PIRL/University of Arizona)
A volcano spread across an area greater than Lake Michigan could erupt any day. Located on Jupiter’s moon Io scientists predict that Loki, named after the Norse trickster god, is due to explode sometime in mid-September. The volcano last erupted in May 2018, an event also predicted by scientists.
“Loki volcano is huge — 200 kilometers across ...read more
Native Americans have been visiting Calvert Island off the Canadian coast for more than 10,000 years. (Credit: Pacific Northwest Sailing/Shutterstock)
Humans have long found comfort on Calvert Island, just off the coast of mainland British Columbia. For millennia, they have climbed the island’s rocky outcrops, walked through its rainy conifer forests, and waded through its chilly intertidal pools to collect crabs, mussels, and other marine life.
There, in 2014, a group of Canadian re ...read more
