So you want to be a citizen scientist? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has got you covered. NSF supports citizen science across all areas of science, whether your passion is to scan the night sky, or explore your own backyard.

Join a flock of birders

    eBird is an online platform that allows bird-watchers to go online and record their sightings to a database. With more than 100,000 active users, eBird's system is a treasure of information on bird population, distribution and habitat, which users can explore in real time.

Count every drop

    The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is the largest provider of daily precipitation observations in the United States. Volunteers set up rain gauges and record data every time a rain, snow or hail storm passes over. Data is organized and shared on the CoCoRaHS website, and used by scientists, farmers and more.

Search for stars with your computer

    Einstein@Home uses your computer's idle time to search for space signals. The project has already had major successes: Volunteers discovered about 50 stars, using data from Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory and Australia's Parkes Observatory. Einstein@Home also searches for gravitational-wave signals using data from NSF's Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.

Be part of a supercomputer

    To link all those home computers, Einstien@Home uses software called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, better known as BOINC. The software choreographs(安排，筹划) the technical aspect of volunteer computing and helps you use radio telescope signals to search for alien life.

Join the plankton party

    Without plankton, life in the ocean would not exist. These tiny organisms form the base of the food chain, and play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Plankton Portal enlists citizen scientists to identify images of plankton, snapped by the In Situ Icthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS), an underwater robot engineered at the University of Miami. ISIIS has taken millions of images in oceans around the world and upload them into a database; classifying the images helps researchers understand plankton diversity, habitat and behavior.

    When Dee Dee Bridgewater learned that she would become a 2017 NEA Jazz Master, a series of thoughts and feelings flooded her mind. “It was so far out of my orbit and just my whole sphere of thinking,” she said in a conversation at NPR this spring, hours before she formally received her award.

    She's 66-far from retirement age in jazz, and on the extreme forward edge of the NEA Jazz Masters people. So she was aware of her relative youth in the field She also recognized that there haven't been many women in the ranks of NEA Jazz Masters: fewer than 20, out of 145. That idea led her to reflect on her predecessors (前任): legendary singers like Betty Carter* who was seated back in 1992, and Abbey Lincoln, who received the nod in 2003.

    Bridgewater sought inspiration and advice from both Carter and Lincoln, as she recalls in this period of Jazz Night, which features music recorded during the season opener for Jazz at Lincoln Center. On a program called “Songs of Freedom”, organized by drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr., Bridgewater sang material associated with Lincoln as well as Nina Simone: an extremely angry song of the civil rights movement, like “Mississippi Goddam”.

    A separate concert, “Songs We Love”, found Bridgewater singing less politically charged (but still exciting) fare like “St. James Infirmary”, which appears on her most recent album. In words as well as music, this period reveals how seriously Bridgewater takes that responsibility, seeing as how it connects to her own experience in the jazz lineage. But maybe “seriously” isn't the right word when it comes to Dee Dee, whose effervescence (欢腾) shines through even in a reflective mood. Join her here for a while; she's excellent company, no more or less so now that mastery is officially a part of her resume.

Let E-bikes Power New York's Transit Future

    Providence, R. I., just became the 13th city to develop an electric-assisted bike-share system, which runs or is developing bike-share networks in cities across the United States. Ironically, the Brooklyn-based company cannot operate in its hometown of New York City,due to the wrongheaded ban on electric bicycles.

    In many major cities in the U. S. and abroad, e-bikes are flourishing and helping to solve major urban challenges. Stockholm is adding 5, 000 e-bikes to its bike-share system. UPS is delivering packages in Hamburg using electrically-assisted cargo tricycles. And San Francisco's DoorDash food delivery service has found e-bikes to be the best mode to navigate heavy traffic and limited parking.

    In striking contrast, New York City insists e-bikes are banned under law. More than 900 e- bikes were seized and more than 1, 800 summonses（召回）were issued by the New York Police Department in 2017,following Mayor de Blasio's decision to limit e-bike usage, despite the fact that no data or records exist to show e-bike-related safety incidents.

    Who does the e-bike restriction hurt? The e-bikes seized in 2017 primarily belonged to food delivery workers, who are immigrants from Asia and Latin America. New Yorkers love their delivery: A new study from the New York City Department of Transportation found that more than half of city residents receive food deliveries at least a few times per month."

    In fact, the top three neighborhoods for e-bike summonses-the Upper East and West Sides and East Midtown-also consisted of more than 70% white residents. It's difficult to divorce the penalty of workers of color from the predominantly white, rich neighborhoods to whom the meals are delivered.

    It is true that the rush to maximize delivery numbers leads to higher speeds and potentially dangerous biking. To that end, the city should improve and enforce safe cycling and expand bicycling infrastructure to ensure safe passage for cyclists and pedestrians.

    Outside New York, cities and companies are finding that e-bikes are convenient, have low carbon footprints and require less space than cars on city streets. As New York City seeks to improve traffic, better air quality and encourage active modes of transportation, it is confusing that a mode that checks all of those boxes would be outlawed.

    The city must stop pedaling backwards on both workable transportation modes and the racially-charged policies surrounding them. It is time for New York City to embrace e-bikes as the very useful, worker-enabling, convenient and environmentally-forward mode that they are.

    Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, are designed mostly for extroverts (性格外向者).

In the typical classroom, students are often divided into groups—four or five or more kids all facing each other. And kids are working on countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on unaccompanied flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. As for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers (局外人) often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers believe that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert (性格内向者), even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.

The same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and stare of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks —which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing thoughtful employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas.

    In fact, some of our great leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. However, they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power, because people could feel that these leaders were in control, not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right.

    MacDonald's will soon remove cheeseburgers and chocolate milk from its Happy Meal menu to set a good example in offering a healthy diet for kids at its restaurants.

    Customers can still ask for cheeseburgers or chocolate milk with kids' meal, but MacDonald's said that not listing them would make them less likely to be ordered. Since it removed soda from the menu four years ago, orders for it with the Happy Meal have fallen by 14%.

    As MacDonald's is known for getting more business from families with children, it is especially important for it to offer a healthy diet instead of junk food. And the Happy Meal is a key part of that. The Happy Meal has long been a target(目标) of health advocates(拥护) and parents who link it to childhood obesity(肥胖症). To get rid of its bad image, MacDonald's has made many changes on the Happy Meal over the years, including cutting the size of its fries and adding fruit.

    Recently, the company replaced its former apple juice with a new kind of juice that has less sugar. MacDonald's wants all its Happy Meal choices to have 600 calories or fewer. It also wants less than 10% of the meal calories to come from fat and added sugar. The cheeseburger and chocolate milk didn't meet those new standards. However, MacDonald's is trying to cut sugar from chocolate milk and believes it'll be back on the menu eventually.

    There will be other changes. For example, bottled water will be added as a choice to the menu, but it will cost extra. Currently, the Happy Meal menu lists milk, chocolate milk, and apple juice.

    For international restaurants, MacDonald's said that a least half of the Happy Meal choices available must meet the new standards. Some MacDonald's restaurants are adding new menu items to obey. For example, In Italy, a grilled chicken sandwich was added to the Happy Meal menu.