 affects hikers and others who recreate outdoors. Haze pollution diminishes scenic views and can negatively affect respiratory and cardiovascular health.
Here is how you can help: Simply hike to your favorite vista along a trail in the Appalachian Mountains, take a photo from your viewpoint, and record your opinion of the view. Email your photo, and send in the data sheet.
It's that easy to contribute to real science that will help us understand how haze pollution affects mountain views.
Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET)
Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET) volunteers conduct beached bird surveys along the east coast of the United States in order to identify and record information about bird mortality. Volunteers examine the spatial pattern of bird carcass deposition and how it varies across time.
The project brings together interdisciplinary researchers and citizen scientists in a long-term collaborative effort to identify and mitigate threats to marine birds.
These surveys provide baseline information about bird mortality and help to detect mass mortality events such as oil spills, algal toxins, and disease outbreaks. Marine birds can serve as indicators of ecosystem and human health; monitoring the threats they face and their mortality patterns can teach us about the health of the marine environment.
This project relies heavily on a working partnership between concerned citizens with an incomparable understanding of local ecosystems and natural phenomena, and scientists with the training and knowledge to synthesize and verify the data generated by local residents. Through this synergistic relationship, scientists exponentially increase the amount and range of data they can access, and residents come to see the larger patterns and trends of which their local ecosystem is a part.
Chordoma Cancer Cell Lines Needed to Save Lives!
The mission of the Chordoma Foundation is to rapidly develop effective treatments and ultimately a cure for chordoma, while improving the diagnosis, treatment, and quality of life for people affected by this devastating bone cancer of the skull and spine.
Currently, no effective chemotherapies exist, and a lack of valid chordoma cell lines is preventing the development of new treatments. The Chordoma Foundation needs your help to assemble a panel of well-characterized chordoma cell lines that can be shared with researchers and companies across the world. Cell lines in this panel should represent the diverse set of clinical manifestations of the disease, including chordomas of the skull-base and spine from primary, recurrent, and metastatic tumors from adult and pediatric patients.
The Chordoma Foundation will award a $10,000 prize for each cell line that is determined by the Chordoma Foundation to meet the requirements listed in the Detailed Description and Technical Requirements. The prize will be made as an unrestricted award to your institution to be used for scientific and educational application. In return for the award, Solvers and their institutions are expected to grant rights to the Chordoma Foundation to freely use, store and distribute the cell lines for all research and development purposes. The terms of the grant of rights are included in the Challenge-Specific Agreement for this Challenge. If required by your institution, the Chordoma Foundation also will work with you to execute an appropriate material transfer agreement to govern sharing of your cell line.
Discover how to submit your cell lines in the Detailed Description and Technical Requirements for the Challenge.
Sound Around You Project
I am building a sound map of the world as part of a study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. We need your help!
We’re asking people across the world to use our new iOS app on their iPhones or iPads (or any recorder) to record short clips from different sound environments, or "soundscapes"--anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping centre. Then we ask volunteers to comment on their soundscapes and upload them to our virtual soundsc