This news piece overviews two games that engage citizen scientists in helping to develop quantum computing. I am partial to these projects because as a physicist, I have always been drawn in by the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics. And as a fun side note – as it turns out – for at least one of these…
Since the seventies, millions of North American birds have disappeared and a third of species are now of high regional conservation concern, a new report reveals. Experts agree that their long-term conservation will only be achieved by building transnational partnerships and involving local communities in citizen science projects. Migratory birds connect the North American continent as millions…
Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test. An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially…
Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, with only one-thousandth of 1 percent now identified, according to the results of a new study. The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report’s authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey…
By now the story has become something of a local legend. It goes something like this: Brian Brown, entomology curator at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, bet a museum donor that he could find a new species, entirely unknown to science, just about anywhere. It sounds like an audacious claim until you realize…
One test of a citizen science project’s success is the ability to produce scientific results – and sometimes that’s a case of connecting the right people. This excellent story involves exactly that – and a gecko. On August 14, 2013, Glen Yoshida snapped a photo of a lizard clinging to a wall on his front…
Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face. Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern that’s bringing California its wettest winter in years — and all in the…
Human-machine collaboration is the key to solving the most complex issues of the world, an editorial published recently in the journal Science suggested. Championing “human computation”— a system that combines the artificial intelligence of machines and talents of humans, the authors claim the system could successfully tackle complex issues like climate change and geopolitical conflicts….
Smorball tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software significantly hampers full-text searching of digitized material. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic…
Jellyfish abundance can inform what is happening in the oceans on a larger scale, and researchers are asking citizen scientists to post jellyfish observations on a special website. “Citizen science … is valuable because it is multiplied with such large numbers. To tap into that pool of has huge advantages,” said Steven Haddock, a researcher at the University…