April is Citizen Science Month. Kansas City is full of places to learn about our world | Opinion
We often associate April with the showers that bring May flowers, and of course, April Fool’s Day. But there’s more to April than that. April is Citizen Science Month. For many people “science” is the thing that bespectacled scientists do while wearing white coats hunched over laboratory tables covered in test tubes filled with bubbling concoctions.
That’s not exactly right, though. Science happens everywhere (not just in a lab) and is for everyone (no Ph.D. required). You’ll just need to look up in the sky — with appropriate eye protection — to see the moon partially block the sun during the solar eclipse on April 8 to witness science in action.
Although watching science happen is kind of fun, it’s much more exciting to “do” science. Unfortunately, the last time many of us did science was in a lab class in high school where you and a lab partner tried to replicate the chemical reaction you were studying in Chemistry (without setting off the fire alarms), learn about genetics or photosynthesis and plant growth in Biology (without killing your pea plant) or duck out of the way of a bowling ball pendulum because your Physics lab partner foiled the principle of conservation of energy by imparting a little more kinetic energy to the ball before release. Or maybe more recently you took your kids to The Regnier Family Wonderscope Children’s Museum, or visiting family members to Science City at Union Station to do something fun over the holidays.
But science isn’t just for kids. There’s still plenty of science that you can do as an adult. During Citizen Science Month (and all year round, actually) you can work with others in the local region or around the world to answer questions that a single scientist could not answer alone. For example, maybe your brain plays an April Fool’s Day joke on you and causes your tongue to trip up, or to forget the word for something or someone’s name. Don’t worry, those occasional speech errors are normal, and by documenting them in a phone app, you can help language scientists learn how the language system works when it works correctly.
If you aren’t able to hear someone speaking to you because the cicada songs are so loud, consider taking a picture or two of those little guys (and yes, only the male cicada sings) on your phone and submit the images to the Cicada Safari at CicadaSafari.org so we can learn more about their unique life cycle. Maybe you want to be outside, but not have your nose stuck in yet another phone app; you could tag Monarch butterflies to track their migration patterns each fall at MonarchWatch.org
If you think you are too old to chase after flying insects, then consider participating in a study at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Kansas. Many colleges and universities in the Kansas City area look for people (everyone from infants to older adults) to participate in research studies that ask all kinds of questions. If none of those local research projects interest you, check out the SciStarter webpage at SciStarter.org/citizensciencemonth for other ways to do science during Citizen Science Month or any time during the year, and work with others to advance research projects around the world.
The new discoveries made in those studies may help improve the life of someone you know or our whole community. And you might learn something new, as well as help others learn something new. As the SciStarter webpage says, “Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something!” No fooling.
Michael S. Vitevitch is a professor at the University of Kansas and director of the Spoken Language Laboratory in the Department of Speech Language Hearing Sciences and Disorders.