• John Pickering retired today from the University of Georgia after 32 years on the faculty. He now plans to work part time with Sam Houston State University in Texas, building a permanent home for Discover Life in their university's cloud, start every day with Mothing, inventory sites to support Save all species, and write poems and take photographs to make us think about life and laugh.
  

• You can now access the stories that we feature on our home page together as a series. See http://www.discoverlife.org/stories, which we have designed with viewing options for large monitors through phone screens.
  

  Each story covers some aspect of nature. Together they give insight into life's diversity, natural history, ecology, and the forces of natural selection that organisms face. We hope that they make you laugh and think about the wondrous diversity of interactions and the many mysteries about life that science still doesn't understand. Think about what's going on and why. Question our explanations. There may be better ones.

  Our goal is to produce 366 stories so that there is a unique one for each day of the year. We hope that teachers and parents will use them as daily "starters" that get everyone to think, create hypotheses, share their ideas, and enjoy nature.

• Today we surpassed 1,200 species of moths identified at Pick's porch lights at his house in Athens, Georgia. Woo hoo. Go team!  Since we began mothing in 2010, we've uploaded 528,000 photographs from 22 sites ranging from Canada to Costa Rica, 176,000 from Pick's house. Across this network of sites, we've now identified 283,000 moths to 3,069 species. Pick's accumulation curve is interactive and shows nightly data collection since inception. Our software updates this graph and our other results each morning. For more details see Mothing.

• Today we launched a crowdsourcing application to help the Fish and Wildlife Service survey seabirds. Give it a go!

• In November Discover Life surpassed a total of 3 billion hits since inception in 1998. We have served 27.7 million IP addresses in the process.

• Life Discovered -- Summer Newsletter    [4.8mb pdf]

• Our contributors' albums now contain over 1.5 million images!
• We just exceeded 25 million total IP addresses served since our inception in 1998.
• We've averaged 661,000 monthly users (IP addresses served) over the past 12 months.

Many thanks to everyone for your support and use.

• Many thanks to James Rosindell. Our partnership with OneZoom has come to fruition. Discover Life is deep-linking to OneZoom's interactive phylogenies of 22,800 tetrapods. OneZoom takes you on an incredible journey using a fractal to show how species are related to each other. See Discover Life's Black Bear page as an example and then click on OneZoom's icon

  .        Don't get seasick!

• Life Discovered -- Spring Newsletter    [24mb pdf]

• Students at Georgia Perimeter College give a presentation at the Georgia Academy of Science
  Documenting Changes in Moth Life-Cycles and Abundance Caused by Urban Warming and Pollution

• Journey with natural history collectors from the past... The world's natural history museums contain billions of specimens collected over 200 years. They can help us understand the natural history of the past, study current changes, and predict and manage the future of life on Earth. But we need your help to process them. Please help us capture data by participating in our new Time Machine. It's fun!

• Life Discovered -- Fall Newsletter    [33mb pdf]

• We just published the latest version (Draft-37) of
  Ascher, J. S. and J. Pickering. 2013.
  Discover Life bee species guide and world checklist (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila).
  See http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?guide=Apoidea_species
  For the first time this checklist contains over 20,000 species.

• We just identified the 1,100^th moth species photographed at Blue Heron Drive, Clarke County, Georgia since we started mothing in 2010. Many thanks to everyone involved, particularly Cameron, Mary, and Tori. See species accumulation curve.

• In September Discover Life surpassed 100 million monthly hits for the first time, serving 828,000 IP addresses in the process. We've now totalled 2.15 billion hits since inception in 1998.

• Our species interaction data and visualization tools are now using R software. For example, see Australian Hemiptera superfamilies on host plant orders. This is part of Species Interactions of Australia Database with Gerry Cassis at the University of New South Wales as part of the Atlas of Living Australia.

• Discover Life surpassed two billion hits today!

• Life Discovered -- Summer Newsletter    [8.5mb pdf]

• Today we broke a 1,000 identified moth species at our Blue Heron site. Since we started mothing in 2010, we've taken over 100,000 photographs of moths, beetles, frogs, and other critters that have come to lights at Blue Heron. Of these we've identified 75,000 to species. Many, many thanks to everyone who's contributed, particularly Cameron, Mary, Tori, Alec, Cody, Stella, Sam and Joe. We'll celebrate this biodiversity milestone with a fun gathering this fall. Stay tuned.

• In April, Discover Life had 65 million hits from over 538,000 unique IP addresses -- our most active month ever. Thanks to all y'all's help and participation. It's not just Sam Droege. Go team!

• Launch of Sandy Creek Nature Center community observation site with pizzas, presentations, and moth party. Fifty people and a bunch of moths joined in the fun.

• Life Discovered -- Spring Newsletter    [9mb pdf]

• Discover Life keeps on growing -- in August, we received over 50 million hits from over 375,000 unique IP addresses. It was our best month yet!

• Thanks to Jason Hollinger, we have now finished integrating "Ways of Enlichenment" and Discover Life. Each night, Discover Life pulls in names and photographs from Ways of Enlichenment, and builds an interactive checklist. Jason Hollinger and the folks at Ways of Enlichenment are keeping the names current, and any changes will be reflected on Discover Life as part of our taxonomic authority files. Thanks to our guru Jason, we are glad to have finally reached enlichenment!
• Thanks to Markus Scherer who just produced six instructional videos that are linked on the album pages and the mothing pages. These videos tell you how to photograph moths, upload photogtraphs, ID them, and tag them with where and when. They are about five minutes each and we suggest you use them if you are a first time user or if you need help. Many thanks, Markus!
• Discover Life now has a server mirroring www.discoverlife.org in Australia at the University of New South Wales. This and a backup server are part of Gerry Cassis' and John Pickering's project to database sepcies interacitons, funded by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). If you are in that neck of the woods, you may get faster service by going to http://ala1.science.unsw.edu.au or you can go to our home page and click on the "University of New South Wales" link at the very bottom of the page. Ultimately we hope to have servers elsewhere in the world -- if you'd like one at your location, let us know.