#citizen-science

#citizen-science

Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable new planet about 146 light-years away which is Earth-sized and has conditions similar to Mars. The candidate planet, named HD 137010 b, orbits a sun-like star and is estimated to be 6% larger than Earth. An international team of scientists in Australia, the UK, the US and Denmark identified the planet using data captured in 2017 by the Nasa Kepler space telescope's extended mission, known as K2.

"I started wondering how our city environments potentially shape wild animals," Raffaela Lesch, a biologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the study's senior author, told SFGATE. "How might the environment where we live change them in a way that might be similar or the same to domestication? That's really the idea that sparked this work with the raccoons."

When a total solar eclipse plunged North America into darkness on the afternoon of April 8, 2024, the songbirds in Bloomington, Ind., suddenly fell silent. In the middle of the forest, the only sounds biologist Kimberly Rosvall could hear were the croaks of nocturnal frogs and the distant howl of a coyote. But when sunlight returned after four minutes of night, the songs did, too, as hundreds of birds greeted the morning in unison with a cheerful dawn chorus.

The Big Windermere Survey saw 350 volunteers collect more than 1,000 water samples from over 100 locations, many previously untested, across ten sessions spanning two and a half years.

Join citizen scientists at the annual Lake Merritt BioBlitz Saturday to help document Lake Merritt's array of living organisms.