We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

This week’s project is one suitable for all ages – searching out ladybugs! “Across North America ladybug species composition is changing.  Over the past twenty years native ladybugs that were once very common have become extremely rare.  During this same time ladybugs from other parts of the world have greatly increased both their numbers and range. 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.  We’re asking you to join us in finding out where all the ladybugs have gone so we can try to prevent more native species from becoming so rare.”

“To be able to help the nine spotted ladybug and other ladybug species scientists need to have detailed information on which species are still out there and how many individuals are around. Entomologists at Cornell can identify the different species but there are too few of us to sample in enough places to find the really rare ones. We need you to be our legs, hands and eyes. If you can look for ladybugs and send us pictures of them with our Upload Photos Submission Form we can start to gather the information we need. We are very interested in the rare species but any pictures will help us. This is the ultimate summer science project for kids and adults! You can learn, have fun and help save these important species.

You can help! – Find ‘em, photograph ‘em, and send ‘em

Here is how the program will work:

  1. Go out and collect some ladybugs (see How to Find, Collect, and Photograph Ladybugs and check out our handy Field Guide)

 2. When you find a ladybug – photograph it! (also in “How to Find, Collect, and Photograph Ladybugs“).

  3. Upload your digital images using our submission form along with the time, date, location, and habitat (e.g. garden, wild field, corn field etc.)

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Quick Tips  

The more the photos the better! – even if they are all the same kind of ladybug.

Zeros are useful data!  Tell us even if you searched and didn’t find any ladybugs.

Data are most useful if you can tell us – where and how you collected, how many people collected for how long, the time, date, weather, and habitat.“

How else can you bring this project into your library? We have a few ideas to help you get started:

• Set up a display of books and materials on ladybugs and bugs/insects in general
• Break out the colored pencils and other drawing tools to draw pictures of insects
• Use pipe cleaners, construction paper, and all sorts of other materials to build models of insects – something real or something imaginary
• Look up facts about ladybugs. Find facts about insects that could be found in your areas. Set up a trivia game about insect facts
• Write a story about finding a ladybug. Will it grant wishes? Will it lead you on an adventure?
• Carefully examine your house, your library, and other buildings you are visiting. How many bugs can you find? What types of bugs are they?
• Take pictures of ladybugs to share on your school or library social media account.
• Create a map of lady bugs found in your school area.

We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

If you have anyone in your library who is working on physics, or looking at charts and understanding data, this could be a great project for you!

Finding a ripple in spacetime

“In 1916, the year after correctly formulating the theory of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that accelerating masses create ripples that propagate through the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. However, these ripples are so unbelievably minuscule that Einstein himself thought they would never be detected. A century after this prediction, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational­-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made the first direct detection of this elusive phenomenon.

Though gravitational waves are invisible, they do have a measurable effect on the space they travel through by causing distances to shrink and stretch. The LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington utilize laser light as a very precise stopwatch to measure this effect. A very simplified diagram of the detectors is shown above. The detectors are identical Michelson interferometers, shooting powerful lasers down equal-length cavities four kilometers in length. Since the speed of light is constant, if the race down the interferometer arms and back is a “tie” it means that the light traveled the exact same distance and the arms are exactly the same length. LIGO is set up to have the beams destructively interfere in this case, resulting in no signal in the detectors. However, if one of these arms is stretched or shrunk, say by a gravitational wave, the race will not be a tie; the beam traveling down the shorter arm will win the race and interfere with the beam traveling down the longer arm, creating a signal.

Glitches in the system

LIGO is the most sensitive and complicated gravitational experiment ever built. To detect gravitational waves even from the strongest events in the Universe, LIGO needs to be able to know when the length of its 4-kilometer arms change by a distance 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a proton! This makes LIGO susceptible to a great deal of instrumental and environmental sources of noise. Of particular concern are transient, poorly modeled artifacts known by the LIGO community as glitches. Though the reason for having two detectors separated by thousands of miles is to isolate the detectors from common sources of noise, glitches happen frequently enough that they often can be coincident in the two detectors and can mimic astrophysical signals. Classifying and characterizing glitches is imperative in the effort to target and eliminate these artifacts, paving the way for more astrophysical signals to be detected.

Classifying glitches using computers has proven to be an exceedingly difficult task. A family of data analysis algorithms known as machine learning have made huge strides over the past decade in classification problems, though they usually require a large pre-classified dataset to operate effectively. However, human intuition has proven time and time again to be a useful tool in pattern recognition problems such as this. One of the innovations of this citizen science project is that citizen scientists and computer algorithms will work in a symbiotic relationship, helping one another to optimally classify and characterize glitches. The general workflow will be:

1. Citizen scientists will sift through the enormous amount of LIGO data to produce a robust “gold standard” glitch dataset that can be used to seed and train machine learning algorithms
2. Machine learning algorithms will learn from this classified dataset to sort through more LIGO data, and choose the most interesting, abnormal glitches to be sent back to the citizen scientists
3. Citizen scientists will further classify and characterize these glitch morphologies, determining new glitch categories to be used in the training of the machine learning algorithms

Utilizing the strengths of both humans and computers, this project will keep LIGO data as clean as possible, and help to unlock more of the gravitational wave universe.”

So, how can you bring this project into your library, or your school, beyond the work here? We have a few ideas:

• Set up a display of books on Einstein, physics, or the basics of science
• Set up some basic experiments to test gravity by dropping different items and timing them.
• Set up some balloons and fill with different gases. Why do some rise and some do not?
• Let students/patrons build a small scale roller coaster. How do you decide what speed you can use? Why are safety bars/seat belts important for passengers?
• Use gravity to paint. Spread paint across paper hanging on a wall, and let it drip down. If you can manage to do it outside, let students throw paint at paper, and watch it splat and drip down the paper.
• Look up biographies of people involved in science who have made big discoveries and contributed to advancing scientific ideas.

We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

This week we are looking ahead to a February project!

Great Backyard Bird Count

Join us February 18–21, 2022

“Each year people from around the world come together to watch, learn about, count, and celebrate birds.

Each February, for four days, the world comes together for the love of birds. Over these four days we invite people to spend time in their favorite places watching and counting as many birds as they can find and reporting them to us. These observations help scientists better understand global bird populations before one of their annual migrations.

Each year our participation grows as more people of all ages around the world spend their weekend counting, learning about, and celebrating birds. See results from past years highlighting the data and trends from the Great Backyard Bird Counts.

Joint Partnership

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an inter-organizational effort between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and Birds Canada. We work together to bring the joys of bird watching to our members.

Join Us

Brown Pelicans and gulls by Tony Peebles/GBBC.

Whether you count one bird or hundreds, participating is easy and fun for all ages! Let birds bring you closer to nature and to each other by spending four days in February with us!”

While you are dreaming about February and getting ready for the great bird count, how can you bring this program to your library? We have a few ideas to help you get started:

• Set up a display about birds – books and any other materials that would be bird related
• Get out colored pencils, crayons, markers, and other drawing tools to draw different kinds of birds
• Write a story about a bird that has visited your yard or visited the school
• Use a phone or other camera and take pictures of birds in your area
• Look up facts about the birds you see. Look up facts about birds living in other areas. Host a trivia game about birds.
• Set up a library scavenger game, hunting for bird pictures, facts, books, models, or other bird-related materials.

We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

This week we are looking at strategies you can use for your computer. “The Citizen Science Grid uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) for volunteer computing. You can download and install BOINC, attach to our project, and volunteer your computer to aid us in using computer vision algorithms to find out what is happening in the video gathered by our field biologists. Eventually, we will use these volunteered computers to filter this video, so that the video we show to our users contains mostly interesting events.”

Some of the programs include:

• Wildlife@Home Wildlife@Home is citizen science project aimed at analyzing video gathered from various cameras recording wildlife. Currently the project is looking at video of sharp-tailed grouse, Tympanuchus phasianellus, and two federally protected species, interior least terns, Sternula antillarum, and piping plovers, Charadruis melodus to examine their nesting habits and ecology.
• SubsetSum@Home The Subset Sum problem is described as follows: given a set of positive integers S and a target sum t, is there a subset of S whose sum is t? It is one of the well-know, so-called “hard” problems in computing. It’s actually a very simple problem computationally, and the computer program to solve it is not extremely complicated. What’s hard about it is the running time – all known exact algorithms have running time that is proportional to an exponential function of the number of elements in the set (for worst-case instances of the problem).
• DNA@Home The goal of DNA@Home is to discover what regulates the genes in DNA. Ever notice that skin cells are different from a muscle cells, which are different from a bone cells, even though all these cells have every gene in your genome? That’s because not all genes are “on” all the time. Depending on the cell type and what the cell is trying to do at any given moment, only a subset of the genes are used, and the remainder are shut off. DNA@home uses statistical algorithms to unlock the key to this differential regulation, using your volunteered computers.

How can you help to bring in some of this program into your library? We have some ideas:

• Set up a display on computers and using computers to solving problems
• Set up a display of materials on wildlife and animals in your area
• Set up a display of materials on math
• Set up a display of materials on DNA and other biology topics
• Talk about project management, and how working as a team – remotely or in person – can get a lot of things done on a bigger scale
• Work on some basic programming skills. Can you set up a website? Can you make adjustments?

We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.

So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.

This week we look at a very Minnesota STEM project – looking at information in lakes across the country!

“The Secchi Dip-In began in 1994 by eminent limnologist Dr. Robert Carlson and colleagues to enable volunteers to submit water clarity measurements to an online database and see how their data compare on a variety of scales- local to national. The program has also been utilized for volunteers to begin monitoring efforts and to increase monitoring efforts within their communities. In the midst of underfunded state volunteer monitoring programs, the Secchi Dip-In has served as a place for volunteers to continue submitting their data. In 2015, Dr. Robert Carlson transferred the operation of the Secchi Dip-In to the North American Lake Management Society and over the past 20 years, the database accumulated more than 41,000 records on more than 7,000 individual waterbodies.”

“The Secchi Dip-In is a demonstration of the potential of volunteer monitors to gather environmentally important information on our lakes, rivers and estuaries.

The concept of the Dip-In is simple: individuals in volunteer monitoring programs take a transparency measurement on one day during the month of July. Individuals may be monitoring lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, rivers, or streams. These transparency values are used to assess the transparency of volunteer-monitored lakes in the United States and Canada.

Most Dip-In volunteers use the Secchi disk, but we welcome the participation of volunteers who monitor sites such as rivers and estuaries where the Secchi disk cannot be used. If your program uses a turbidity tube, a turbidity meter, or a black disk, your volunteers can participate.

A goal of the Dip-In is to increase the number and interest of volunteers in environmental monitoring. A volunteer monitoring program cannot long survive if information flows only from the volunteer to the agency. Volunteers need to be assured that their efforts are not only appreciated but are also a necessary part of the total monitoring effort. It is the premise of the Dip-In that this assurance is enhanced if the volunteer is a part of a national as well as the local effort.

The Dip-In also provides an international perspective of water quality. It gives a comprehensive glimpse at transparency at volunteer-monitored sites across North America and the rest of the world. Scientists and volunteers can get a sense of how transparency varies according to water type, regional geology and land use. What is more important, these annual Dip-In snapshots can be put together to form a changing picture of transparency over time.”

How can you bring this STEM citizen science project into your library? We have a few ideas to help you get started!

• Set up a display of books and articles about lakes
• Let students draw maps to identify the lakes in your county, or your area of the state
• Find information about your local water, and the pollutants in it. What kinds of things does your local water provider clean from the water that comes to your library or to your school?
• Find a pond or lake in your area. What kind of tests can you do on the water? How far down can you see? How clear is it, or how much algae is growing on the water?
• What kinds of animals and birds are living near your pond or lake?
• Write a story about living in a lake or a pond.