Excerpt: EVE Online players will help scientists look for other planets from the comfort of their computer desks later this year. The game’s developer, CCP Games, is teaming up with Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), the University of Reykjavik and the University of Geneva to crowdsource space exploration within EVE’s virtual universe. Players will hunt…
Excerpt: Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The simplest explanation for these impressive ridges is that lava flowed into pre-existing fractures in the ground and later resisted erosion better than material around them….
Abstract: This brief article includes mention of several citizen science projects that will be part of the scientific studies carried out during the upcoming eclipse. – LFF – Excerpt: Prof. Hugh Hudson and Laura Peticolas of the Space Science Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, are heading a Megamovie project to use thousands of…
Excerpt: Back in 2002, in his first year as a graduate student at Ohio State University, Joshua Pepper was sitting in his office one day when a professor walked by and asked what he was doing. Nothing much, Pepper said. Good, the professor replied. Then you’ll have time to work on my project. Pepper, an…
Editor’s Choice: This is a blog post from four years ago that makes an interesting claim that the relative lack of citizen science projects in Chemistry is related to the unwillingness of most researchers in that field to carry out “open data” practices. –LFF– Excerpt: Diagnosing cancer often involves identifying potentially cancerous cells in images of large…
Excerpt: Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) scientists were among those taking part in the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco earlier this month. The December 11-17 gathering, which attracted some 24,000 geoscientists, offered an opportunity for HamSCI scientists to present Amateur Radio-based research, discuss possibilities for upcoming experiments, and…
Editor’s Choice: A fast-moving area of citizen science is in tackling “Big Data” problems by coupling the ability of machine algorithms to quickly process well-defined images with the human ability to discern patterns in images that are not as well-defined. This article describes Gravity Spy – a recent project that is at the vanguard of exploring the…
Excerpt: Back in February, seismologists at UC Berkeley released MyShake, an app that passively monitors for seismic activity, both watching for earthquakes and warning users if one is underway. In the months since its introduction, the app has outperformed its creators’ expectations, detecting over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries. The app has received…
Input from about 10,000 volunteers viewing images from Martian south polar regions has identified targets for closer inspection, yielding new insights about seasonal slabs of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) and erosional features called “spiders.” The volunteers from around the world have been exploring the surface of Mars by examining images from the Context Camera…