Tag Archives: citizen science

Citizen science = crowdsourced science?

Deirdre Lockwood’s Nov. 12, 2012 article (Crowdsourcing Chemistry) for Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) offers a good overview of the various citizen science projects and organizations while using the terms citizen science and crowdsourcing science interchangeably. For me, it’s  a ‘poodles and dogs’ situation; all poodles are dogs but not all dogs are poodles.

Here are two examples from the article,

Although the public has participated in scientific research since at least the first Audubon Christmas Bird Count of 1900, so-called citizen science has gained momentum in the past decade through funding, enthusiasm, and technology. This trend is dominated by projects in biology, but chemists are getting on board, too. NSF’s funding of citizen-science projects has grown from a handful each year in the early 2000s to at least 25 per year today.

Online gaming project Foldit has attracted many participants to find the lowest-energy configuration of proteins. Foldit players recently solved the structure of a retroviral protease that had long stumped structural biologists (Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol., DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.2119).

There’s a difference between going out and counting birds (citizen science) and 50,000 or more people solving a problem in biology (citizen science and crowdsourcing science). In the first instance, you’re gathering data for the scientist and in the second instance, you’re gathering, analyzing, and solving a science problem alongside the scientists. There is, of course, a great big grey zone but if you’re looking to participate in projects, the distinction may be useful to you. Do take a look at Lockwood’s article as she mentions some very exciting projects.

H/T to the Nov. 14, 2012 news item about Lockwood’s article on phys.org.

Laughing and other citizen science projects at ScienceStarter

Thanks to David Bruggeman (Pasco Phronesis blog) and his Oct. 18, 2012 posting for alerting me to SciStarter (Note: I have removed some links),

SciStarter, a clearinghouse for scientists and interested civilians to find each other for projects has noted that some of their projects run into trouble.  With limited time and resources, help is not always available.  So they would like to enlist the crowd.

Next month SciStarter will run a contest to help find solutions for these problems. …

I wasn’t able to find any more information about the contest on the SciStarter website but the organization’s blog offers an Oct. 18, 2012 posting by John Ohab which lists ten items from its project list (Note: I have removed pictures),

The Royal Society Laughter Project: The Royal Society has put together a playlist of different laughs that you can listen to. The tricky part is that some are real and some are fake. See if you can guess which laugh is real and which is posed. The results will help researchers at the University College of London learn how people react to different sounds. This is science that will make you LOL!

Age Guess: AgeGuess is a simple project in which you guess the age of other people by looking at their pictures. In just a few minutes, you can help create a first of its kind research data set for the study of human aging. The project is studying the differences between how old you look to others and your actual age.

EyeWire: Scientists need your help mapping the neural connections of the retina. All you have to do is color brain images! EyeWire is a fun way to learn about the brain and help scientist understand how the nervous system works.

Digital Fishers: Are you one of those people who loves the ocean but doesn’t want to deal with the sunburns, parking, or other unpleasant aspects that come with the territory? Here’s a project that puts you in touch with the ocean and saves you the extra costs in suntan lotion. Digital Fishers allows you to help scientists identify different species of fish. You can assist with research by watching 15-second videos from the comfort of your own computer and click on simple responses.

Musical Moods:  Musical Moods is a sound experiment that aims to find out how viewers categorize the mood of certain TV theme tunes. The goal is to find out whether there are new ways of classifying online TV content through the mood of the music rather than the program genre itself. The whole experiment takes about ten minutes and is incredibly easy. You listen to themes and answer a few questions about each theme afterward.

Citizen Sort: Video games have the potential to do more than entertain. Citizen Sort is taking advantage of this potential by designing video games that make doing science fun. Citizen Sort is a research project at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York.

Project Implicit:  Project Implicit offers the opportunity to assess your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to ethnic groups to sports team. In 10-15 minutes, you’ll report attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics. It’s that easy! The experience is both educational and engaging, and you get the chance to assist psychological research on thoughts and feelings.

Be A Martian: NASA’s Be A Martian is an interactive Mars science laboratory that allows visitors to help scientists learn about the red planet. You can help identify important features in images returned from previous Mars rovers, ask and vote on questions for NASA Mars experts in a virtual town hall, explore a Mars atlas to learn more about the planet’s terrain, send postcards to Spirit (another Mars rover), and watch educational videos in the Two Moons theater.

Clumpy: When plants experience bacterial infections, the chloroplasts inside the plant cells appear to “clump” together. This can be a bad sign for plants. To help understand these bacterial infections, scientists need help classify images of clumpy chloroplasts. All yo have to do is arrange the images from least clumpy on the left to most clumpy on the right.

MAPPER: Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada. The Pavilion Lake Research Project has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

I did take a closer look at the MAPPER project since the research takes place in my home province,

Photo: getmapper.com (downloaded SciStarter.com)

Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, terabytes of video footage and photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP’s DeepWorker sub pilots. This data must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like “how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?” and “why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?”. But before these questions can be answered, all the data must be analyzed.

Participation fee          $0

Expenses                     $0

Spend the time          outdoors

Location                      online

Children                      yes

Primary school         yes

Secondary school     yes

Teaching materials    no

I notice this is another of Darlene Cavalier’s initiatives (who also runs the Science Cheerleader website [my May 14, 2012 posting features a profile of Darlene]).

ZomBee Hunters! a citizen science project for finding zombified honey bees

It seems honey bees, in addition to the colony collapse disorder, have a new problem: being turned into ‘zombies’.  From the July 24, 2012 news release on EurekAlert,

The San Francisco State University researchers who accidentally discovered “zombie-like” bees infected with a deadly fly parasite want people across the United States and Canada to look for similar bees in their own backyards.

Today SF State Professor of Biology John Hafernik and colleagues from the SF State Department of Biology and the Center for Computing for the Life Sciences launched ZomBeeWatch.org, a citizen science project to report possible sightings of the parasitized bees.

According to the website, ZomBeeWatch, the ‘Zombie’ or Apocephalis boralis fly lays its eggs (infects) in a honey bee, which parasitizes the honey bee with this consequence (from the news release),

… the “zombees” abandon their hives and congregate near outside lights, moving in increasingly erratic circles before dying. The phenomenon was first discovered on the SF State campus by Hafernik and colleagues, and reported last year in the research journal PLoS ONE.

Here’s the help researchers are asking for (from the news release),

The ZomBeeWatch site asks people to collect bees that appear to have died underneath outside lights, or appear to be behaving strangely under the lights, in a container. They can then watch for signs that indicate the bee was parasitized by the fly, which usually deposits its eggs into a bee’s abdomen. About seven days after the bee dies, fly larvae push their way into the world from between the bee’s head and thorax and form brown, pill-shaped pupae that are equivalent to a butterfly’s chrysalis.

If it looks like their sample contains hatched parasites, “zombee hunters” can upload photos of their sample’s contents to confirm whether they have found a parasitized bee. Along with information about the location of the photographed bee, the images will help the scientists build a better map of the honeybee infection.

ZombeeWatch offers tutorials on how to become a zombee hunter, complete with step-by-step instructions for monitoring and collecting bees, building a light trap and uploading data.

According to the map on ZombeeWatch, there have been reports of the zombified bees in California and South Dakota but no other sightings,yet. From the news release,

Hafernik says he has timed the launch of the site for when the parasitized population begins its seasonal rise. “Right now is still the low season for parasitized bees,” he explained, “but they will start ramping up in August. In the San Francisco Bay Area, infections peak in September through January. We hope to learn about the timing of infections in other areas of North America.”

Since last year’s report, Hafernik and his colleagues have embarked on an ambitious set of experiments to learn more about the plight of the infected honeybees. In one key project, the researchers, led by graduate student Christopher Quock, will tag infected bees with tiny radio frequency trackers to monitor their movements in and out of a specially designed hive. They hope the tracking system will tell them more about how the infection affects the bees’ foraging behavior and why they eventually abandon their hives.

Hafernik and his collaborators are eager to learn as much as they can about the parasite, since it may be an emerging and potentially costly threat to honeybee colonies, especially those that cross from state to state to be used in commercial pollination.

Finally,

The researchers hope the intense public interest in the parasitized bees earlier this year will encourage people to visit and contribute to the ZomBeeWatch site. “We’re sort of a mom and pop operation at this point,” Hafernik said, “but if we can enlist a dedicated group of citizen scientists to help us, together, we can answer important questions and help honeybees at the same time.”

RNA (ribonucleic acid) video game

I am a great fan of  Foldit, a protein-folding game I have mentioned several times here (my first posting about Foldit was Aug. 6, 2010) and now via the Foresight Insitute’s July 16, 2012 blog posting, I have discovered an RNA video game (Note: I have removed links),

As we pointed out a few months ago, the greater complexity of folding rules for RNA compared to its chemical cousin DNA gives RNA a greater variety of compact, three-dimensional shapes and a different set of potential functions than is the case with DNA, and this gives RNA nanotechnology a different set of advantages compared to DNA nanotechnology … Proteins have even more complex folding rules and an even greater variety of structures and functions. We also noted here that online gamers playing Foldit topped scientists in redesigning a protein to achieve a novel enzymatic activity that might be especially useful in developing molecular building blocks for molecular manufacturing. Now KurzweilAI.net brings news of an online game that allows players to design RNA molecules …

Here’s more from the KurzwelAI.net June 26, 3012 posting about the new RNA game EteRNA,

EteRNA, an online game with more than 38,000 registered users, allows players to design molecules of ribonucleic acid — RNA — that have the power to build proteins or regulate genes.

EteRNA players manipulate nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of RNA, to coax molecules into shapes specified by the game.

Those shapes represent how RNA appears in nature while it goes about its work as one of life’s most essential ingredients.

EteRNA was developed by scientists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, who use the designs created by players to decipher how real RNA works. The game is a direct descendant of Foldit — another science crowdsourcing tool disguised as entertainment — which gets players to help figure out the folding structures of proteins.

Here’s how the EteRNA folks describe this game (from the About EteRNA page),

By playing EteRNA, you will participate in creating the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs. Your efforts will help reveal new principles for designing RNA-based switches and nanomachines — new systems for seeking and eventually controlling living cells and disease-causing viruses. By interacting with thousands of players and learning from real experimental feedback, you will be pioneering a completely new way to do science. Join the global laboratory!

The About EteRNA webpage also offers a discussion about RNA,

RNA is often called the “Dark Matter of Biology.” While originally thought to be an unstable cousin of DNA, recent discoveries have shown that RNA can do amazing things. They play key roles in the fundamental processes of life and disease, from protein synthesis and HIV replication, to cellular control. However, the full biological and medical implications of these discoveries is still being worked out.

RNA is made of four nucleotides (A, C,G,and U, which stand for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil). Chemically, each of these building blocks is made of atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and hydrogen. When you design RNAs with EteRNA, you’re really creating a chain of these nucleotides.

RNA Nucleotides (from the About EteRNA webpage)

Scientists do not yet understand all of RNA’s roles, but we already know about a large collection of RNAs that are critical for life: (see the Thermus Thermophilus image representing following points)

  1. mRNAs are short copies of a cell’s DNA genome that gets cut up, pasted, spliced, and otherwise remixed before getting translated into proteins.
  1. rRNA forms the core machinery of an ancient machine, the ribosome. This machine synthesizes the proteins of your cells and all living cells, and is the target of most antibiotics.
  2. miRNAs (microRNAs) are short molecules (about 22-letters) that are used by all complex cells as commands for silencing genes and appear to have roles in cancer, heart disease, and other medical problems.
  3. Riboswitches are ubiquitous in bacteria. They sense all sorts of small molecules that could be food or signals from other bacteria, and turn on or off genes by changing their shapes. These are interesting targets for new antibiotics.
  4. Ribozymes are RNAs that can act as enzymes. They catalyze chemical reactions like protein synthesis and RNA splicing, and provide evidence of RNA’s dominance in a primordial stage of Life’s evolution.
  5. Retroviruses, like Hepatitis C, poliovirus, and HIV, are very large RNAs coated with proteins.
  6. And much much more… shRNA, piRNA, snRNA, and other new classes of important RNAs are being discovered every year.

Thermus Thermophilus – Large Subunit Ribosomal RNA
Source: Center for Molecular Biology (downloaded from the About EteRNA webpage)

I do wonder about the wordplay EteRNA/eternal. Are these scientists trying to tell us something?

Nearby Nature GigaBlitz—Summer Solstice 2012—get your science out

The June 20 – 26, 2012 GigaBlitz event is an international citizen science project focused on biodiversity. From the June 13, 2012 news item on physorg.com,

A high-resolution image of a palm tree in Brazil, which under close examination shows bees, wasps and flies feasting on nectars and pollens, was the top jury selection among the images captured during last December’s Nearby Nature GigaBlitz. It’s also an example of what organizers hope participants will produce for the next GigaBlitz, June 20-26 [2012].

Here’s a close up from the Brazilian palm tree image,

Bee close up from Palmeira em flor, by Eduardo Frick (http://gigapan.com/gigapans/95168/)

This bee close up does not convey the full impact of an image that you can zoom from a standard size to extreme closeups of insects, other animals, portions of palm fronds, etc. To get the full impact go here.

Here’s more about the Nearby Nature GigaBlitz events from the June 13, 2012 Carnegie Mellon University news release,

The Nearby Nature GigaBlitz events are citizen science projects in which people use gigapixel imagery technology to document biodiversity in their backyards — if not literally in their backyards, then in a nearby woodlot or vacant field. These images are then shared and made available for analysis via the GigaPan website. The events are organized by a trio of biologists and their partners at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab.

December’s GigaBlitz included contributors from the United States, Canada, Spain, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. Ten of the best images are featured in the June issue of GigaPan Magazine, an online publication of CMU’s CREATE Lab.

The issue was guest-edited by the organizers of the GigaBlitz: Ken Tamminga, professor of landscape architecture at Penn State University; Dennis vanEngelsdorp, research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Department of Entomology; and M. Alex Smith, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

The inspiration for the gigablitz comes from the world of ornithology (bird watching), from the Carnegie Mellon University June 13, 2012 news release,

Tamminga, vanEngelsdorp and Smith envisioned something akin to a BioBlitz, an intensive survey of a park or nature preserve that attempts to identify all living species within an area at a given time, and citizen science efforts such as the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count.

“We imagined using these widely separated, but nearby, panoramas as a way of collecting biodiversity data – similar to the Christmas bird count – where citizen scientists surveyed their world, then distributed and shared that data with the world through public GigaPans,” they wrote. “The plus of the GigaPan approach was that the sharing was bi-directional – not merely ‘This is what I saw,’ but also hearing someone say, ‘This is what I found in your GigaPan.'”

Here’s an excerpt from the Nearby Nature gigablitz June 20 -26, 2012 Call for Entries,

The challenge: Gigapixel imaging can reveal a surprising range of animal and plant species in the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary settings in which we live, learn, and work. Your challenge is to capture panoramas of Nearby Nature and share them with your peers at gigapan.org for further exploration. We hope that shared panoramas and snapshotting will help the GigaPan community more deeply explore, document, and celebrate the diversity of life forms in their local habitats.

Gigablitz timing: The event will take place over a 7-day period – a gigablitz – that aligns with the June solstice. Please capture and upload your images to the gigapan.org website between 6am, June 20 and 11pm, June 26 (your local time).

Juried selections:    Panoramas that meet the criteria below are eligible for inclusion in the science.gigapan.org Nearby Nature collection. The best panoramas will be selected by a jury for publication in an issue of GigaPan Magazine dedicated to the Nearby Nature collection.  Selection criteria are as follows:

  • Biodiversity: the image is species rich.
  • Uniqueness: the image contains particularly interesting or unique species, or the image captures a sense of the resilience of life-forms in human-dominated settings.
  • Nearby Nature context: image habitat is part of, or very near, the everyday places that people inhabit.
  • Image quality: the image is of high quality and is visually captivating.

Subjects and locations: The gigablitz subject may be any “nearby” location in which you have a personal interest:  schoolyard garden, backyard habitat, balcony planter, village grove, nearby remnant woods, vacant lot meadow next door and others.  Panoramas with high species richness (the range of different species in a given area) that are part of everyday places are especially encouraged.  It is the process of making and sharing gigapans that will transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Here are 3 things to keep in mind when choosing a place:

  • The panorama should focus on organisms in a habitat near your home, school or place of work.
  • Any life-forms are acceptable, such as plants, insects, and other animals.
  • Rich, sharp detail will encourage snapshotters to help identify organisms in your panorama.  Thus, your gigapan unit should be positioned close to the subject habitat – within 100 feet (30 meters) away, and preferably much closer.  Up close mini-habitats in the near-macro range are welcome.

Please do check the Call for Entries for additional information about the submissions.

As for the website which hosts the contest, I checked the About GigaPan page and found this,

What is a GigaPan?

Gigapans are gigapixel panoramas, digital images with billions of pixels. They are huge panoramas with fascinating detail, all captured in the context of a single brilliant photo. Phenomenally large, yet remarkably crisp and vivid, gigapans are available to be explored at GigaPan.com. Zoom in and discover the detail of over 50,000 panoramas from around the world.

A New Dimension for Photography

GigaPan gives experienced and novice photographers the technology to create high-resolution panorama images more easily than ever before, and the resulting GigaPan images offer viewers a new, unique perspective on the world.

GigaPan offers the first solution for shooting, viewing and exploring high-resolution panoramic images in a single system: EPIC series of robotic camera mounts capture photos using almost any digital camera; GigaPan Stitch Software automatically combines the thousands of images taken into a single image; and GigaPan.com enables the unique mega-high resolution viewing experience.

GigaPan EPIC

GigaPan EPIC robotic mounts empower cameras to take hundreds, even thousands of photos, which are combined to create one highly detailed image with amazing depth and clarity.

The GigaPan EPIC and EPIC 100 are compatible with a broad range of point-and-shoot cameras and small DSLRs to capture gigapans, quickly and accurately. Light and compact, they are easy-to-use, and remarkably efficient. The EPIC Pro is designed to work with DSLR cameras and larger lenses, features advanced technology, and delivers stunning performance and precision. Strong enough to hold a camera and lens combination of up to 10 lbs, the EPIC Pro enables users to capture enormous panoramas with crisp, vivid detail.

Bringing Mars Rover Technology to Earth

The GigaPan EPIC series is based on the same technology employed by the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to capture the incredible images of the red planet. Now everyone has the opportunity to use technology developed for Mars to take their own incredible images.

GigaPan was formed in 2008 as a commercial spin-off of a successful research collaboration between a team of researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. The company’s mission is to bring this powerful, high-resolution imaging capability to a broad audience.

The original GigaPan prototype and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

If I understand this rightly, this commercial enterprise (GigaPan), which offers hardware and software,  also supports a community-sharing platform for the types of images made possible by the equipment they sell.

Math puzzles and sunflowers at the Manchester Science Festival

The Manchester Science Festival (UK) has organized a citizen science project in honour of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s (Wikipedia essay) birth (from the essay [Note: I have removed links and bibiographic references]),

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (… TEWR–ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was stockily built, had a high-pitched voice, and was talkative, witty, and somewhat donnish. He showed many of the characteristics that are indicative of Asperger syndrome.

Here’s more about the project, thanks to the GrrlScientist April 16, 2012 posting on the Guardian Science blogs,

What do sunflowers and Alan Turing share in common? Basically, Turing noticed that the number of spirals in the seed patterns of sunflower heads often conform to a number that appears in the mathematical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…). Other plants also show this pattern. When Turing came to the University of Manchester, he began exploring how this phenomenon might help us to understand the growth of plants, a field now known as phyllotaxis.

Tragically, Turing died before his work was complete, so the Manchester Science Festival is asking for you to help mathematicians explore Turing’s ideas about plant growth.

This video on the GrrlScientist posting (there are other related videos in the posting) by Brady Haran, the video journalist who amongst other projects films the Numberphile series, explains Turing’s interest in sunflowers and Fibonacci’s spiral,

You don’t have to be a mathematician to join in although it seems that it’s best if you’re in Manchester (the festival doesn’t specify residence there as a requirement), from the Turing’s Sunflowers webpage on the Manchester Science Festival website,

This spring, we need your green fingers! Join Manchester Science Festival and MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry) for a mass planting of sunflowers as part of an experiment to solve the mathematical riddle that Turing worked on before his death in 1954.

Brighten up Manchester and the Nation, whilst helping mathematicians to explore Turing’s theories about plant growth. We need you to sow sunflower seeds in April and May, nurture the plants throughout the summer and when the sunflowers are fully grown we’ll be counting the number of spirals in the seed patterns in the sunflower heads. Don’t worry – expertise will be on hand to help count the seeds and you’ll be able to post your ‘spiral counts’ online.

The results will be announced during the Manchester Science Festival 2012 (27 Oct – 4 Nov), alongside a host of cultural events connected to Turing’s life and legacy, at MOSI, Manchester Museum and other cultural spaces.

You can find out more about the Manchester Science Festival, which runs from Oct. 27 – Nov. 4, 2012, here.

Although they don’t identify it on the Turing’s Sunflowers webpage,I’m pretty sure this is a bronze of Turing seated on a bench. Someone has thoughtfully given him a bouquet of sunflowers,

Bronze of Alan Turing in Manchester. (downloaded from http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/connect/getinvolved/sunflowers)

Have fun!

Conference on public participation in scientific research

It’s a bit complicated as this is actually a two-in-one deal. The Ecological Society of America (ESA) is holding an annual meeting in Portland, Oregon which runs Aug. 5 – 10, 2012. This meeting overlaps with the Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) which runs from Aug. 4 – 5, 2012. Both meeting and conference are being organized through Cornell University (US). Organizers believe that many participants will want to attend both conferences.

John Ohab in his Feb. 15, 2012 posting on the SciStarter blog notes this,

A Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) will be held in Portland, Oregon on August 4th and 5th, 2012. This landmark event will convene science researchers, project leaders, educators, technology specialists, evaluators, and others from across many disciplines (including astronomy, molecular biology, human and environmental health, and ecology) to discuss advancing the field of PPSR.

I have written about PPSR before but used the term ‘citizen science’. From the Citizen Science Central on Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology website,

With the rapid growth and innovation of public participation in scientific research (PPSR), practitioners are in need of a venue for sharing insights across projects and fields of study. This landmark event will convene science researchers, project leaders, educators, technology specialists, evaluators, and others from across many disciplines (including astronomy, molecular biology, human and environmental health, and ecology) to discuss advancing the field of PPSR. The PPSR Conference is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), a venue that has long been supportive of citizen science and that always welcomes practitioners from diverse fields. We hope that all who are interested in the future of the field of PPSR will join us this August!

There is currently a call for papers for the ESA meeting, deadline Feb. 23, 2012. Organizers have yet to open a call for the PPSR conference.

Champagne galaxy, drawing bubbles for science

If you want to draw bubbles in the name of science and for a better understanding of this galaxy, go to The Milky Way Project to sign up.  Although you may want to read about the January 17, 2012 article by Paul Scott Anderson for physorg.com (originally published in Universe Today) for a better description than the project website offers,

Remember when you were a kid and blowing bubbles was such great fun? Well, stars kind of do that too. The “bubbles” are partial or complete rings of dust and gas that occur around young stars in active star-forming regions, known as stellar nurseries. So far, over 5,000 bubbles have been found, but there are many more out there awaiting discovery. Now there is a project that you can take part in yourself, to help find more of these intriguing objects.

They have been seen before, but now the task is to find as many as possible in the newer, high-resolution images from Spitzer [a space telescope]. A previous catalogue of star bubbles in 2007 listed 269 of them. Four other researchers had found about 600 of them in 2006. Now they are being found by the thousands. As of now, the new catalogue lists 5,106 bubbles, after looking at almost half a million images so far. As it turns out, humans are more skilled at identifying them in the images than a computer algorithm would be. People are better at pattern recognition and then making a judgment based on the data as to what actually is a bubble and what isn’t.

There are more details about The Milky Way Project in Anderson’s article which mentions the Zooniverse in passing. I was surprised to find out that (from the Zooniverse About page),

The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. …

The Zooniverse began with a single project, Galaxy Zoo , which was launched in July 2007. The Galaxy Zoo team had expected a fairly quiet life, but were overwhelmed and overawed by the response to the project. Once they’d recovered from their server buckling under the strain, they set about planning the future!

The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

As for the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA) group mentioned in About Zooniverse, here’s a description from their home page,

“ The CSA is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators ”

The CSA takes proposals and the next selection round will be in February 2012. From the CSA’s proposal page,

Thanks to generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, Adler Planetarium and the Citizen Science Alliance are pleased to announce the first open call for proposals by researchers who wish to develop citizen science projects which take advantage of the experience, tools and community of the Zooniverse. Successful proposals will receive donated effort of the Adler-based team to build and launch a new citizen science project.

Proposals are welcomed from scientists or researchers in any discipline that would significantly benefit from the active participation of tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Building on the success of our existing projects, including Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters and Old Weather, successful proposals will be designed in partnership with the applicants, then implemented and hosted by the Zooniverse team. The applicants will therefore be free to concentrate on making good use of the work of volunteers for the benefit of their research.

We expect proposals to be made by a team who can take responsibility for defining the initial research problem, data set to be used, and who are committed to making use of the results.

They do recommend submitting your proposal by Jan. 15 by the latest which means this is a bit late but maybe next year, eh?

As for the champagne headline, thank you to Eli Bressert who compared the galaxy to champagne with all its bubbles (in Paul Scott Anderson’s article).

NanoSail-D cleans up space junk

Given that our enthusiasm for launching satellites, etc. into the skies has resulted in a floating junk yard as older satellites become inoperable and new ones are sent up to join the old ones, it’s good to see news that NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has completed a successful trial project aimed at removing the debris. From the Nov. 29, 2011 news item on Science Daily,

After spending more than 240 days “sailing” around Earth, NASA’s NanoSail-D — a nanosatellite that deployed NASA’s first-ever solar sail in low-Earth orbit — has successfully completed its Earth orbiting mission.

The flight phase of the mission successfully demonstrated a deorbit capability that could potentially be used to bring down decommissioned satellites and space debris by re-entering and totally burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. The team continues to analyze the orbital data to determine how future satellites can use this new technology.

This technology sounds remarkably like an idea for cleaning up space junk that Dr. Kristen Gates presented at a conference last year. From my Aug. 10, 2010 posting (this section was originally excerpted from the Fast Company article, The Most Beautiful Way to Clean Up Space Junk: A Giant GOLD Balloon [scroll about 1/2 way down]),

Dr. Kristen Gates has one idea, and it’s beautiful and simple. It’s dubbed GOLD–the Gossamer Orbit Lowering Device–and it’s just been revealed at the “Artificial and Natural Space Debris” session of the AIAA Astrodynamics Specialists Conference.

GOLD is not much more than a football-field sized balloon (made of gossamer-thin but super-tough material, a little like solar sails) that is flown into orbit deflated in a suitcase-sized box and then fastened to a dead satellite. It’s then inflated to maximum size, and the huge bulk of the balloon massively increases the atmospheric drag that satellites experience up there in the void. … The drag acts to slow a satellite in its orbital path, and then simple orbital mechanics means the satellite descends into the atmosphere where the denser air heats it to the point it burns up.

Back to the news item on Science Daily for more details about the project and NASA’s partnership with a citizen science organization,

NanoSail-D orbited Earth for 240 days performing well beyond expectations and burned up during reentry to Earth’s atmosphere on Sept. 17 [2011].

NASA formed a partnership with Spaceweather.com to engage the amateur astronomy community to submit images of the orbiting NanoSail-D solar sail during the flight phase of the mission. NanoSail-D was a very elusive target to spot in the night sky — at times very bright and other times difficult to see at all. Many ground observations were made over the course of the mission. The imaging challenge concluded with NanoSail-D’s deorbit. Winners will be announced in early 2012.

A gallery of the NanoSail-D images is now available and here’s a sample of what you’ll find,

Moon-NanoSail Conjunction! Credit: Enzo De Bernardini, Buenos Aires, Argentina Jan. 27, 2011

Here’s De Bernardini’s description of his image,

I caught NanoSail-D crossing the vicinity of the waning moon in a one-second exposure. The satellite has low magnitude (i.e., it is dim), and so the image was enhanced considerably. Slight cloudiness present. The published orbital elements are accurate, the conjunction took place at exactly predicted time. Used a Canon EOS 300D camera at ISO-800, and 80 mm F/5 refractor telescope. Processed with PixInsight.

There’s a separate website for the NanoSail-D project which you can check out here.

Three citizen cyberscience projects, LHC@home 2.0, computing for clean water, and collaborating with UNOSAT for crisis response

I sometimes lose track of how many years there are such as International Year of Chemistry, Year of Science in BC, etc. but here’s one that’s new to me, the European Year of Volunteering.

CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research [I imagine the French version was Centre européen de la recherche scientifique] and the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics) just announced as part of its support for volunteering, a new version of their volunteer computing project, LHC@home, 2.0, From the August 8, 2011 news item on Science Daily,

This version allows volunteers to participate for the first time in simulating high-energy collisions of protons in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Thus, volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops.

This means that volunteers at home can participate in the search for the Higgs boson particle, sometimes known as the ‘god’ particle or the ‘champagne bottle’ boson. (Despite rumours earlier this year, the Higgs boson has not yet materialized as Jon Butterworth mentions in his May 11, 2011 post on the Guardian Science blogs. Note: Jon Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London and a member of the High Energy Physics group on the Atlas experiment at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider.)

This latest iteration of the LHC@home project is just one of a series of projects and events being developed by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (which itself is supported by CERN, by UNITAR [United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and by the University of Geneva) for the European Year of Volunteering.

Two other projects just announced by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (from the Science Daily news item),

Other projects the Citizen Cyberscience Centre has initiated focus on promoting volunteer science in the developing world, for humanitarian purposes. For example, in collaboration with IBM’s philanthropic World Community Grid and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre launched the Computing for Clean Water project. The project uses the supercomputer-like strength of World Community Grid to enable scientists to design efficient low-cost water filters for clean water.

In a separate project supported by HP, volunteers can help UNOSAT, the Operational Satellite Applications Programme of UNITAR, to improve damage assessment in developing regions affected by natural or human-made disasters, for humanitarian purposes.

More information about these projects is available in the August 8, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

As Sergio Bertolucci, Director of Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, emphasizes: “While LHC@home is a great opportunity to encourage more public involvement in science, the biggest benefits of citizen cyberscience are for researchers in developing regions who have limited resources for computing and manpower. Online volunteers can boost available research resources enormously at very low cost. This is a trend we are committed to promote through the Citizen Cyberscience Center”.

Leading international computer manufacturers such as IBM and HP have contributed their support and expertise to Citizen Cyberscience Center projects including UNOSAT [UNITAR’s Operational Satellite Applications Prorgramme]. Using data from space agencies and satellite operators around the world, UNOSAT can produce maps for humanitarian applications such as damage assessment or monitoring deforestation. The project relies on ‘volunteer thinking’ where participants actively analyse imagery and their results are compared.

“From a development and humanitarian perspective, the potential of citizen-powered research is enormous”, says Francesco Pisano, Manager of UNOSAT, ” Participating in the Citizen Cyberscience Center enables us to get new insights into the cutting edge of crowdsourcing technologies. There is no doubt that volunteers are playing an increasingly central role in dealing with crisis response, thanks to the Internet.”

Well, the current London riots are revealing other less salubrious uses of social media and the internet but I like to think that in the end, creative uses will prove more enticing than destructive uses.

ETA August 10, 2011: I found one more year, 2011 is the International Year of Forests.