Stories tagged citizen science
Tornado damage: Garage doors may be a key to how severely a house collapses
It's still at the observational stage, but investigators are looking at the link between strength of garage doors and the amount of damage a home incurs from a passing tornado. After reading this Star-Tribune story, it sounds like a case of the general public connecting the dots before the scientific community.
Tags : 
Enthralled science lecture crowd: Pretty soon they'll all be holding up their lighters.
Courtesy Mark RyanBack a century or so ago, if you didn’t feel like going out to dinner, or attending George Bernard Shaw’s latest production, you’d get all gussied up and go to…a public science lecture.
Historian Lisa Jardine has written a very interesting point-of-view piece regarding how, during the late 19th and early 20th century, science lectures at London’s Royal Institution held their own for attracting audience share.
Crowds of high-society types decked out in evening dress often filled the institute’s Faraday Theater for the celebrated lectures held there on Friday nights. One such event had Pierre Curie demonstrating his and his wife’s latest discovery, radium, before a sold-out throng of neck-craning attendees. Madame Curie was there too, seated in the front row among other distinguished scientists such as Lord Kelvin (at the time propriety and the Institution’s rules didn’t allow a woman to participate in a lecture, and Jardine goes a bit into to this, too). But the point is, the Curies were big stars and attendance was so overwhelming that for the first ever one-way streets were created to handle the carriage traffic.
The Royal Institution building - along with its celebrated Faraday lecture theatre - has been refurbished recently, and Jardine hopes that new science lectures to be held there will help re-ignite a severely lagging public interest in the field. There’s a ton more distractions out there to compete with but who knows, if done right, science demonstrations and discovery lectures could be the next big “thing to do”.
Although the Royal Institution’s mission has been "Teaching the application of Science to the common Purposes of Life", they also managed to make it enticing. After all, science can be both fun and amazing (the cryogenics demonstration put on here at the Science Museum of Minnesota still delights me even after seeing it at least 4 dozen times!)
You can read Lisa Jardine's piece here .
Spring is springing, and birds are nesting, and you can be a part of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's NestWatch project. They provide the training. You can observe natural nest sites or nest boxes, and your observations get permanently archived in North America's largest breeding bird database. The data collected helps scientists better understand threats to bird species. Pretty cool.
The Warner Nature Center is offering a Project NestWatch workshop to teach you how to monitor birds nesting in your neighborhood. Become part of an exciting national pilot program to create “citizen scientists.” You'll learn how to collect valuable data on nesting birds in your neighborhood that will be studied by some of the world’s most renowned bird scientists. And you'll learn more about the birds local to your neighborhood, where they nest, how you can make your backyard more bird-friendly, and how to submit your nest observations to a national online database.
Falcon chicks: In the spring, museum visitors can watch baby peregrine falcons on our FalconCam. (Courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service)
Mourning dove: This one was nesting in my backyard. You can see the messy nest and a chick's head peeking out. (Photo by Ken Kornack)
- WHEN: May 5 or May 12, 2007, 12:30 - 5:00 PM
- WHERE: Lee and Rose Warner Nature Center (map & directions)
- HOW MUCH? It's free! Drinks and snacks included
- WHO CAN PARTICIPATE? Families with children 8 and older, teachers, and anyone bird-curious.
Call 651-433-2427 to register or ask questions. (Please register by May 2.)
**NestWatch is a project led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Weather spotters needed
in Earth and Space Science, Scientific Inquiry, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and Forces of Nature
Ever wanted to be a storm spotter? Now's your chance! The National Weather Service (NWS) relies on local SKYWARN storm spotters to confirm, from the ground, what meteorologists are seeing on radar. NWS storm spotters are not tornado chasers like the folks in the movie "Twister." Instead, they report wind gusts, hail size, rainfall, cloud formations, and the like to NWS and local emergency management agencies.
Tornado: This tornado, seen in its early stages of formation over Union City, Oklahoma (May 24, 1973), was the first one caught by the National Severe Storms Laboratory doppler radar and chase personnel. (Photo courtesy NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OA
New radar equipment is still not sensitive enough to determine the existence of an actual tornado. It can only predict where severe weather is likely to occur. So the NWS needs trained volunteers to verify actual severe weather.
With peak storm season just around the corner (mid-June here in the Upper Midwest), free, 2.5-hour classes are being offered to train new SkyWarn volunteers.
SkyWarn class schedule, greater Minnesota
SkyWarn class schedule, Twin Cities Metro area
For the next four days--February 16 through 19--birdwatchers of all abilities and ages are identifying and counting birds throughout North America. The Great Backyard Bird Count is going on right now, and it's free, easy, takes as little as 15 minutes, and helps the birds.
According to the GBBC website:
"Scientists and bird enthusiasts can learn a lot by knowing where the birds are. Bird populations are dynamic; they are constantly in flux. No single scientist or team of scientists could hope to document the complex distribution and movements of so many species in such a short time.
We need your help. Make sure the birds from your community are well represented in the count. It doesn't matter whether you report the 5 species coming to your backyard feeder or the 75 species you see during a day's outing to a wildlife refuge.
Your counts can help us answer many questions:
How will this winter's snow and cold temperatures influence bird populations? Where are winter finches and other “irruptive” species that appear in large numbers during some years but not others? How will the timing of birds’ migrations compare with past years? How are bird diseases, such as West Nile virus, affecting birds in different regions? What kinds of differences in bird diversity are apparent in cities versus suburban, rural, and natural areas? Are any birds undergoing worrisome declines that point to the need for conservation attention? Scientists use the counts, along with observations from other citizen-science projects, such as the Christmas Bird Count, Project FeederWatch, and eBird, to give us an immense picture of our winter birds. Each year that these data are collected makes them more meaningful and allows scientists to investigate far-reaching questions."
Don't know anything about birds? That's OK. The folks at Great Backyard Bird Count can teach you all you need to know. (They have lots of fun games and activities, too.)
Results of the bird count are constantly being updated. See what's going on in your neck of the woods!
Aurora borealis: over Edinburgh in 2004.
Courtesy piglicker
The aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, are caused by high-energy particles streaming from the Sun collide with molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Sun has been pretty active of late, and scientists at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks are predicting another aurora peak for the night of the 19th, perhaps lasting through the night of the 20th. The aurora may be visible throughout Canada and the northern tier of states in the US, as well as Russia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Tasmania.
Check their website for hourly forecasts , and for general information on auroras.
If you see the aurora, let us know! Post a comment with your location and the time you saw it (or didn’t see it), and we’ll try to produce an aurora map.
Recently, an anonymous visitor posted the question, "Why haven't I seen any fireflies over the last few summers?" That got me thinking, and I realized that I haven't seen many fireflies, either. (You don't usually see fireflies in Minnesota until late June or early July, but I don't remember seeing any last year or the year before.) So what's the skinny?
Firefly: Have you seen any of these guys lately? (Photo courtesy Aricee)
I thought about it a little bit.
Like many other insects', fireflies' life cycle includes egg, larval, and adult stages. Adults lay eggs on or just under the soil. Because they eat critters like worms, slugs, and snails, most larvae are found in rotting wood or leaf litter or on the edges of streams and ponds. Adults tend to favor the same habitats as the larvae, but we know a lot less about adult habits. Their mouths suggest that they eat other bugs, and scientists know that some fireflies eat other fireflies, but it's likely that they eat plant nectar and possibly other foods, too. You're likely to see adult fireflies over lawns and meadows and at the edges of woods or streams.
Firefly_larva: Crazy, huh? I know I've never seen these guys around! I'd have made a point of looking them up! (Photo courtesy Myriorama)
Courtesy Myriorama
My backyard seems like it would be firefly heaven, and yet I'm not seeing them. What other factors could be at play?
I thought of three. And then I found a fourth possibility on this cool website. (Maybe you can think of others?)
- Many areas have stepped up their mosquito control efforts due to concerns about West Nile virus. Is it possible that this has somehow impacted firefly populations? (I think this is an unlikely explanation, because why would we notice a reduction in fireflies but not other insects? And further, there certainly seem to be plenty of mosquitoes!)
- Our temperatures have been wacky. Maybe fireflies require a specific temperature range to hatch, or to change from their larval stage to their pupal stage? Are we exceeding that comfort zone, or not staying in the proper range long enough?
- Lack of habitat is always a possibility. Maybe they aren't finding enough to eat or the right places to lay their eggs?
- Since fireflies communicate with blinking light, perhaps they prefer to inhabit areas away from city centers with all the ambient light that goes along with them? (I think this is unlikely, too, since I've seen fireflies in the city before.)
Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places at the right times. (Here are a few reported sightings from Minnesota…)
I'm going to do some investigating, talking to some folks at the Warner Nature Center and the University of Minnesota's Entomology Department. I'll post answers as I get them.
But I want to hear from you: have you seen fireflies? Where? Describe the place you saw them. What date? And what time of day?
Science Buzz and all related activities
Add a new comment