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Help map, collect, and correct information about power generation locations around the world. Through placing pins of power generation sources on a map or filling out and reviewing correcting information about these sources you will help make studying power generation impact on the global carbon cycle and climate change reach new levels.

Despite its apparently steady glow, the Sun is a churning mass of superhot plasma that regularly produces powerful flares and storms that can knock out power and communication systems here on Earth. With this Lab explore what makes the Sun so volatile and get access to the same data, images, and tools that scientists use to predict solar storms—so that you can predict them for yourself.

The iSeeChange Almanac is a socially networked weather Almanac for communities to collectively journal their climate experiences -- their observations, feelings, questions, and decisions --- against near-real time climate information.

Founded in April 2012 in Western Colorado, iSeeChange is a public radio and media experiment that fosters multimedia conversations between citizens and scientists about how seasonal weather and climate extremes affect daily American life. From the earliest spring recorded in the history of the United States, a landmark wildfire season, nationwide droughts, and weather records breaking everyday, climate affects every citizen and binds communities together.

iSeeChange is produced by Julia Kumari Drapkin in Western Colorado at KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio as a part of Localore, a nationwide production of AIR in collaboration with Zeega, with principal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We just launched the Almanac this week in Western Colorado. Stay tuned for more locations in the coming year!

Help track the health and abundance of the mid-Atlantic scallop fishery!

Researchers at the University of Delaware have developed a new robot-based approach to surveying marine life the ocean floor. They use Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which can navigate underwater without direct human control, to take photos of marine life in its natural habitat.

By becoming a SubseaObserver you'll play a roll in ocean conservation by helping organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) make better decisions about how to manage the scallop fishery now and for future generations.

As a SubseaObserver you can name your own virtual AUV and choose what part of the mid-Atlantic you'd like to explore.

SubseaObservers also includes information about scallop biology, how the fishery is managed, how AUVs work and where they're used.

Panamath is a free-standing software that can be used to assess number sense - your intuitive recognition of numbers and their relationship. Researchers in laboratories throughout the world have utilized this research tool in studies of number knowledge, mathematical acuity, and learning in general.

Curious? Use Panamath to test your own number sense, read more about the research being done or download the software and adapt it for your own research or educational purposes.

Digital Fisher needs volunteers to help analyze deep-sea videos -- 15 seconds at a time. Volunteers watch a short video of the ocean and click on a simple response.

The NEPTUNE Canada observatory has recorded thousands of hours of video from underwater cameras, but there is currently no software sophisticated enough to automatically identify a wide variety of animals. This is where you come in!

With no training at all, you'll be able to help scientists unveil the mechanisms that shape the animal communities of the ocean. You'll help scientists answer fundamental questions about biodiversity, species behavior, and the impact of various environmental factors.

Bat Detective is an online citizen science project which allows visitors to the website to take part in wildlife conservation by listening out for bat calls in recordings collected all over the world.

By sorting the sounds in the recordings into insect and bat calls, bat detectives will help biologists learn how to reliably distinguish bat 'tweets' to develop new automatic identification tools.

Bats use lots of different types of sounds, from singing to each other to find a mate, to using the echoes from their tweets to find their way around. Usually bat sounds are inaudible to humans as they are too high for us to hear, but special 'time expansion' ultrasonic detectors convert these sounds to a lower frequency, and visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to these unique recordings and help distinguish different sounds.

One out of every five species of bats is threatened with extinction and better automatic identification tools are desperately needed to quickly process vast amounts of sound data collected by volunteers from the bat monitoring programme iBats who survey bat populations each year.

Bats are found all over the world from local parks to pristine rainforests and monitoring their population trends provides an important indicator of healthy ecosystems. Developing new tools that allow biologists to interpret population trends from sound will allow bats' tweets to act as a way to track environmental change.

Bat Detective was developed at University College London, Bat Conservation Trust, Bat Life Europe with the Citizen Science Alliance.

Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. This is a serious problem if you want to train computers to understand language. If we don't know what words mean, it's hard to teach computers what they mean. It is similarly hard to understand how children come learn the meanings of words, when we don't fully understand those meanings ourselves.

Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of separate tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of meaning.

You can participate for as little as a few minutes or come back to the site over and over to help code the many thousands of words in English.

The Astro Drone game is part of a scientific crowd sourcing project. People who possess a Parrot AR drone can play the game, in which they are challenged to perform different space missions in an augmented reality. Contribute to future space exploration by playing the free Astro Drone game!

The iPhone app is more than a game. Players can choose to contribute to a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. The app processes the images made by the AR drone's camera, extracting abstract mathematical image features. These features can neither be interpreted by humans, nor can the original image be reconstructed. However, the features can be used by robots to learn how to navigate in their environment. Players can join the experiment by going to the high score table. If they agree, the feature data is sent over the Internet.

The first release contains the training level, in which players learn to dock as well as possible to the International Space Station. New levels will be added incrementally with new releases.

AstroDrone is a project performed by the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency.

Join seafarers in the global scientific experiment to study marine phytoplankton.

The phytoplankton underpin the marine food chain, so we need to know as much about them as possible. To participate in this project, you'll need to create a Secchi Disk, a tool that measures water turbidity, and use the free iPhone or Android ‘Secchi’ application.

You can take a Secchi Disk reading as often as you wish, every day, once a week, twice a month, or just occasionally. The data you collect will help scientists around the world to understand the phytoplankton.

Join in and help make this the world’s largest public marine biological study.

Planet Four is a citizen science project in which volunteers help planetary scientists identify and measure features on the surface of Mars.

Scientists need your help to find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface, features that indicate wind direction and speed. By tracking these features, you can help planetary scientists better understand Mars’ climate.

All of the images you'll see depict the southern polar region, a little known area of Mars. The majority of these images have never been seen by humans until now.

This is your chance to explore the surface of Mars like never before!

Access to health care and the cost and safety of healthcare services are of critical interest to our country. Physicians and other professional care providers, and academic and community-based hospitals and clinics, are important partners in discovering the best methods to deliver care. Input from patients – the consumers of healthcare services – is also vital. Regenstrief Institute, Inc., an internationally recognized healthcare research organization affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine, is conducting an online contest, inviting submission of original ideas for improving the delivery of health care in the U.S. As an academic institution, we are particularly interested in the ideas of our next generation of young professionals and scientists. The winning idea will be selected by a panel of medical and community-based professionals and researchers, according to the following criteria: innovative idea with measurable impact for healthcare consumers; feasible to implement in the U.S. healthcare system within five years; and compatible with Regenstrief Institute’s mission to improve health through research that enhances the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care. The prize includes a trip for the winner to Indianapolis, Indiana for the idea kick-off at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Regenstrief Institute, Inc.

This is a transcription project that aims to transcribe the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection, written in the late 1870's. This collection contains scanned notebooks of |Xam and !Kun languages of the Hunter-Gatherer (Bushman) people of Southern Africa.

Marblar is unique and fun way to engage in citizen science and exchange ideas across disciplines. Marblar posts research projects in need of creative, real-world applications and they ask YOU to come up with those applications.

Singing up is easy and free and there are new projects added regularly. Projects are posted for three weeks. Through online collaboration, the final solutions are posted for users to vote on and further discuss. Top solutions are even awarded cash prizes!

Beginning November 14 through the end of the year, students ages 13-18 around the globe are invited to participate in “Data Detectives”, an engaging web experience to learn about how Big Data will impact their lives and the world they will be inheriting.

Data Detectives is the student component of the Human Face of Big Data, a global crowdsourced project conceived by “Day in Life” series creator Rick Smolan. It aims to help people better visualize the ways big data is shaping our future on this planet, and includes a smartphone app, worldwide events, a large format illustrated book with an interactive iPad app, and a documentary.

The Data Detectives initiative invites students to answer questions, explore fascinating examples of how Big Data is changing their world, interact with real-time data and see how other students around the globe are impacted in similar and different ways.

Nonmarine ostracods, tiny crustaceans with an excellent fossil record, are common in aquatic ecosystems. The Ostracod Metadatabase of Environmental and Geographical Attributes (OMEGA) facilitates access to global geographical and environmental distributional data for nonmarine ostracods, supporting applications in biodiversity auditing, biogeography and the calibration of species as fossil proxies for past environmental and climatic change. Citizen Scientists can help improve accuracy and coverage of datasets by adding, correcting and validating the geographical coordinates of localities.

Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by United States’ ships since the mid-19th century.

These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and will improve our knowledge of past environmental conditions. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and tell the stories of the people on board.

There are cures for cancers buried in our data. Help us find them.

Cancer Research UK and the Zooniverse need your help to classify archive cancer samples. We’re on the brink of many new breakthroughs. By giving just a few minutes of your time and a few clicks of your mouse, you can help accelerate our research. By doing so, you are helping us to make these breakthroughs happen faster.

Each image you will see is a tiny tumour sample from a huge dataset. Help our scientists to accelerate the analysis of this data by identifying the coloured sections of the image using our prompts, and bring forward the cures for cancers.

The Bodleian Libraries are enlisting the help of the public in order to improve access to their music collections. Over four thousand digitized scores, mostly piano music from the nineteenth century, many of which have illustrated covers, have now been made available online.

By describing these images, you will not only be helping to provide access to this valuable but hitherto 'hidden' collection, you will also be facilitating future research into popular music of the period and the wider social function which it performed during the Victorian age.

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. Students from Syracuse University drew, colored, programmed and coded two unique citizen science video games. They are Forgotten Island and Happy Match.

Happy Match is a twist on the classic matching game. Players will classify photos of animal, plant and insect species that scientists took live in the field. Each round of the game has a different question and players will drag the animal, plant or insect photo into one of the photo answers along the bottom. Scientists wrote the questions in Happy Match based on information they want to know. By classifying the photos, you'll these help scientists as they study the natural world.

Forgotten Island is a point and click adventure game. Players take on the role of a lost adventurer with a secret past. As the player explores the island they meet a suspicious robot spouting orders to re-classify the falling photographs of plant, animal or insect species. The player will also solve puzzles and explore diverse locations from icy peaks to fiery volcanoes.The more classifications a player does, the more money they earn buy items and solve the mystery of Forgotten Island.

Citizen Sort is partially supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant SOCS 09-68470.

eCYBERMISSION is a web-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) competition free for students in grades six through nine where teams can compete for State, Regional and National Awards while working to solve problems in their community. Deadline to sign up: January 15th

eCYBERMISSION challenges you to explore how Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics work in your world.

Biodiversity Volunteer Portal

Helping to understand, manage and conserve Australia's biodiversity through community based capture of biodiversity data.

Help us capture the wealth of biodiversity information hidden in our natural history collections, field notebooks and survey sheets. This information will be used for better understanding, managing and conserving our precious biodiversity.

ZooTeach is a website where teachers and educators can share high quality lesson plans and resources that complement the Zooniverse citizen science projects. Citizen science offers a unique opportunity for any person, of any age, of any background to get involved and make a contribution to cutting edge science. Here at Zooniverse headquarters we believe that getting students involved in citizen science offers educators a free, easily accesible and inspiring opportunity to bring real science into the classroom.

Join thousands of people around the world in a conversation about World Wide Views on Biodiversity. What do you think about the way biodiversity is managed? How do you think we should solve the problem of biodiversity loss? Tell us – and see what others are saying!

On Saturday, September 15, people in over 30 countries joined together for a day of deliberations about these issues. There is still time to add your voice – use the materials on the project's site to learn more about the issue of biodiversity, and then chime in with your ideas. Strike up a conversation with your friends to help inform your decision, or leave a comment to start a discussion with others.

Biodiversity is the species, genetic, and ecosystem diversity in an area, sometimes including associated components such as landscape features or climate. Still feel like you need to know more? You can dive deep into the issues with information from some of the National Research Council’s recent and historic work on the topic. Or skip ahead to the booklet, which all participants in the World Wide Views on Biodiversity deliberations received.
Charge:

Vote to add your voice to the conversation.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needs you to take complex scientific data and images and turn them into informative graphics to convey a simple and easy to understand messages! The JPL’s newest venture is called JPL Infographics, and they need your help to create and post your very own creations of scientific graphic art.

All of the resources are at your fingertips, including high-resolution images, 3-D models, fact sheets, and loads of other data build your very own Infographics. You can browse the numerous of other user creations to get inspired and then upload your creation online!

This is a really fun and challenging project and your work will be used to educate and inform others on the goings on of cutting-edge space exploration. So fire of both sides of your brain and create some educational space art!

Just listen to a few laughs and tell us whether they are real or posed.

The results will help scientists from University College London to understand the way we perceive and react to different sounds. The experiment should take about 10 minutes.

The Meteon Network is an ambitious collaboration in Italy to make scientific data from over 400 weather nationwide stations available in an easy to understand visual interface. You can now join in this groundbreaking work and gain access to loads of real time data. You can even add your own data and share analysis among the many members of the network.

The Meteon Network also employs several newer, more human centric, data products including something they call ‘weatherness’, among others, that are normalized to an easy to understand scale. All of these, and several other more traditional weather related measurements, are all displayed in real time on the Network’s interactive mapping application.

This kind of nationwide effort to monitor, analyze, and give citizens a more complete picture of weather may serve as a model for others to follow. Now is your chance to get involved in a trailblazing project and get into weather today!

At this very moment in Serengeti National Park, 200 cameras are flashing throughout the night, in corners of the park where tourists never go.

These are camera traps -- remote, automatic cameras that take pictures of passing wildlife - and the Serengeti Lion Project is conducting the largest-ever camera trap survey to better understand the Serengeti ecosystem. The camera traps capture over 1,000,000 images of wildlife each year, capturing the grandeur of the wildebeest migration and rarely seen species from aardvarks to zebras.

Help to transmit these photos by satellite from the Serengeti to the U.S., where they can be analyzed to advance science and conservation. Join this unprecedented initiative to bring cutting edge technology to the wilds of Serengeti, and you'll get first access to witness the Serengeti Live on your computer.

The chloroplasts inside plant cells appear to "clump" together during bacterial infection; this can be devastating for plants and seriously compromise crop yields. We need your help to classify plant cell images by their "clumpiness" in order to further this research.

Helping us to classify the images will give insights into the progression of bacterial infection in plant cells.

What should we do about climate change?

Somehow we have to answer this question. You can help. The Climate CoLab seeks to harness the collective intelligence of contributors from all over the world to develop solutions to the problem of global climate change.

In this online global forum, people can create, analyze and select detailed proposals outlining the actions they believe should be taken to address climate change.

Petridish allows citizens to support science by directly funding independent and small -scale research projects. While this is a somewhat non-traditional citizen science project, funding is an important part of science, and Petridish allows science lovers everywhere to truly make a difference and support innovative science.

Similar to other crowd funding style websites, Petridish lets you browse projects and donate online to the research projects of your choice. Each project has a variety of donation levels with enticing rewards for each level. Typical rewards included souvenirs from the field, acknowledgement in journal articles, chances to join researchers in the field, dinner with a famous researcher, and even naming rights to new species!

You can explore projects by both research subject and reward type. After you donate, share your involvement and information about the project through Facebook and Twitter and help projects gain momentum and reach their goals.

Calling all Citizen Scientists to contribute your thoughts to the DEVISE project and help develop tools to measure learning in citizen science! DEVISE (Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments) is an NSF-funded project spearheaded by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A major goal of DEVISE is to help project leaders evaluate the many different ways in which participants learn as they collect, analyze, and manipulate data. We need your feedback to develop tools that can accurately measure outcomes related to science and environmental interest, knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Participating in this project is easy – just follow the link "get started now" above right, and give your thoughts on topics such as the Nature of Science, Motivation, Science Inquiry Skills, and Environmental Stewardship. There are no right or wrong answers - we just want your opinions.
Simply click the Join In tab above or the Get Started button to the right!

You are invited to the Hubble Space Telescope's vast science archive to dig out the best unseen Hubble images -- and win prizes!

Over two decades in orbit, Hubble has made a huge number of observations. But hidden in Hubble’s huge data archives are still some truly breathtaking images that have never been seen in public. The archive is so vast that nobody really knows the full extent of what Hubble has observed.

This is where you come in. Researchers need you to find and tweak Hubble observations using a set of simple online tools. If you're feeling saucy, you can find Hubble observations and then process them using professional astronomical imaging software. You can win various Apple products and goodies.

Competition ends May 31, 2012.

The North American Bird Phenology Program, part of the USA-National Phenology Network, was a network of volunteer observers who recorded information on first arrival dates, maximum abundance, and departure dates of migratory birds across North America. Active between 1880 and 1970, the program was coordinated by the Federal government and sponsored by the American Ornithologists' Union. It exists now as a historic collection of six million migration card observations, illuminating almost a century of migration patterns and population status of birds. Today, in an innovative project to curate the data and make them publicly available, the records are being scanned and placed on the internet, where volunteers worldwide transcribe these records and add them into a database for analysis.

Ancient Lives allows citizen scientists to help transcribe ancient papyri texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. The data gathered will help scholars reveal new knowledge of the literature, culture, and lives of Greco-Romans in ancient Egypt.

The 1,0000 year old transcripts were originally found by researchers in 1896 in the city of Oxrhynchus, often called the ‘City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. Over the next decade, over 500,000 fragments of papyri were uncovered and the collections stands today as largely unstudied. That is why Ancient Lives needs your help to measure fragments and transcribe Ancient Greek characters.

The project is a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and several other international groups.

Planet Hunters is a project from Zooniverse where citizen scientists help astronomers identify new planets.

Through data taken from the Kepler Spacecraft, citizens are helping scientists identify stars with possible planets in the Cygnus constellation. The Spacecraft takes brightness data every thirty minutes from over 150,000 stars so there is a lot to look at.

When planets pass in front of stars, the brightness of that star dips, which shows up on the light curves taken from Kepler. These patterns are not always easily recognized by computer algorithms, and in many cases, the human brain is actually more capable of identifying brightness dips.

Submit your cellular images to The Cell: An Image Library - CCDB is a public and easily accessible resource database of images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes. The purpose of this database is to advance research on cellular activity, with the ultimate goal of improving human health.

This Library is a repository for images and movies of cells from a variety of organisms. It demonstrates cellular architecture and functions with high quality images, videos, and animations. This comprehensive and easily accessible Library is designed as a public resource first and foremost for research, and secondarily as a tool for education. The long-term goal is the construction of a library of images that will serve as primary data for research.

The Library effort represents not only the creation of the electronic infrastructure, but also a systematic protocol for acquisition, evaluation, annotation, and uploading of images, videos, and animations.

Help scientist improve maps of Mars and participate in other research tasks to help NASA manage the large amount of data from the Red Planet.

Users create Martian profiles and become "citizens" of the planet. In the map room, citizens can then earn Martian credits by helping place satellite photos on Mars’s surface, counting craters, and even helping the rovers Spirit and Opportunity by tagging photos with descriptions.

The highly interactive website is rich in content and contains other informational videos and mapping applications for citizens to tour Mars and get to know every nook and cranny of its rocky surface.

Become a Martian, explore Mars, have fun!

Help scientists with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter better understand the structure and history of the lunar surface: identify, measure, and classify images of craters on the moon. Your efforts will help us define the places future missions will study closer - including perhaps even future human missions.

The Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge asks individuals and teams of programmers from around the world to develop a fuel-optimal control algorithm. The algorithm must enable a satellite to accomplish a feat that’s very difficult to do autonomously: capture a space object that’s tumbling, spinning or moving in the opposite direction.

From March 28 to April 25, 2012, challenge participants will collaborate via the Zero Robotics Website to create a computer algorithm that will be programmed into bowling-ball sized satellites called SPHERES (short for Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). An object, simulating a Phoenix payload on-orbit delivery system, will be set in motion inside the ISS under varying conditions, such as tumbling or spinning. The algorithm developed will need to direct the SPHERES satellite to approach the moving object and orient itself to contact with the object via Velcro on the SPHERES satellites.

The winners of each round will be invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to view the finals via videolink from the ISS, where the four algorithms will be programmed into SPHERES and tested.

Zero Robotics is co-sponsored by NASA and is run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory to engage U.S. middle and high school students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

You don’t have to be a science expert to be a brilliant solar stormwatcher. Help scientists spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

Explore interactive diagrams to learn out about the Sun and the spacecraft monitoring it. The STEREO spacecraft is scientists’ latest mission to study the Sun and space weather – not clouds and rain, but how solar storms change conditions in space and on Earth.

Solar Stormwatch isn't just about classifying data. You can talk to other members on our forum, sign up for our space weather forecast from Twitter, and learn about the latest discoveries on our blog. You can also see how solar storms affect Earth at our Flickr group Aurora chasers, featuring beautiful photos of aurora.

if you’d like to know more about what you’re looking at, then explore our beautiful and interactive zoomable diagrams to find out about the Sun and the STEREO spacecraft monitoring it. And check out our scientists’ profiles too.

Temperature Blast is a Maryland Science Center C3 Citizen Science project designed to introduce participants to methods of studying climate. Citizen Scientists collect live and archive Weatherbug data from select stations in the Baltimore region to compare temperatures and log this data for scientists.

Scientists at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study then use this data to test models of temperature patterns across the city to aid in urban planning. This data illustrates the Urban Heat Island effect on the area, a phenomenon classified by temperature differences between a metropolitan area and more rural landscape nearby. An Urban Heat Island is not an effect of climate change, but rather of our activity shaping the environment around us.

Using either this website or our Smartphone application (available free of charge for both iPhone and Android) Citizen Scientists submit temperature data from six weather stations in the Baltimore region. The purpose of this is to collect a stream of simultaneous data from multiple sites in and around the metropolitan area. This data, along with first-hand location observations, will be used to understand the Urban Heat Island Effect in Baltimore.

Anyone with access to the Internet and/or a Smartphone can be a Citizen Scientist and participate in Temperature Blast!? While the data obtained from the program is relevant to the Baltimore metropolitan region, there is no geographic or age restriction for Citizen Scientists.

SETILive is an exciting new project in which volunteers try to detect extraterrestrial signals from space.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) uses images from the Allen Telescope Array and powerful computer algorithms to search for these signals automatically. However, the computer algorithms have a hard time distinguishing between signals that might be extraterrestrial and those that are from earth. This is where you come in!

Researchers need your help to find interesting signals in all that noise. Eventually, they want to learn whatever tricks you use to do your classifications, so they can teach their computer algorithms to do the same thing.

With AlmereGrid you can donate your unused computing time to science. We are located in the Netherlands and support Dutch - and other European universities. Currently we run medical applications from the Erasmus MC - an academic hospital in Rotterdam. We try to communicate in Dutch as much as possible with our volunteers.

EyeWire is a citizen science project aimed at mapping the neural connections of the retina. All you have to do is play a relaxing and absorbing game of coloring brain images!

In the game, participants reconstruct the tree-like shapes of the neurons in the retina. By tracing branches throughout images, you can help the computer develop 3-D reconstructions of the neurons.

Anyone can participate – you don’t need any specialized knowledge of neuroscience – and your contributions will help scientists understand how the brain functions. In addition, engineers will also use your input to improve the computational technology that powers the game. This will eventually lead to making software that can detect brain abnormalities that are related to disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is offering a new online
course for educators focused on its successful citizen science program – *PBB
- 501 Project BudBurst: Introduction to Plant Phenology and Climate Change.
* This inaugural offering is *being offered at no charge *to K-12 educators
and is suited for both formal and informal educational settings. This
online course provides all needed information to implement Project BudBurst
(www.budburst.org) in the classroom and engage your students in a national
program by learning more about plants and climate change at a local level.

Act now and be part of the first online course from The BudBurst Academy
that begins on February 15 and take advantage of the *registration fee
being waived*.

Involvement in Project BudBurst will give students valuable experience
collecting data and will give them the opportunity to make meaningful
contributions to ongoing scientific research where scientists are very
interested in the observations students across the county are making.

This professional development course will provide you with detailed
information on Project BudBurst and how to participate including how to
select your plants and make observations, suggestions for structuring your
classroom involvement, classroom activities to engage your students in
making observations, analyzing data, as well as forming a community with
other K-12 educators within Project BudBurst.

Participants in PBB - 501 can sign up for optional graduate level
continuing education credits from Colorado School of Mines. The fee for 2
credits is $90.00

More information can be found at www.budburst.org/academy

The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy. We're asking you to help us find and draw bubbles in beautiful infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Understanding the cold, dusty material that we see in these images, helps scientists to learn how stars form and how our galaxy changes and evolves with time.

Marine scientists need your help to categorize the complex calls of Killer Whales (Orcas) and Pilot Whales and to understand what the calls mean.

Whales and dolphins make sophisticated sounds that play a critical role in communicating, orienting in the ocean environment, and locating food. Scientists have already begun to categorize Killer Whale calls; however, Pilot Whale calls are much less studied.

Project organizers have assembled recordings of two species from across the world's oceans and seas. Citizen scientists simply listen to individual whale calls and identify potential matching calls. Your contribution will help researchers understand what the whales are saying. You can also help discover whether certain calls are made by an individual, one group, or across broad areas.

I do research in child undernutrition and am working on a project to understand the important factors underlying child undernutrition in Fort Saint Michel – an urban slum of Cap Haitien, Haiti. We’re gearing up for a mapping exercise in Fort Saint Michel to capture the exact locations of important health-promoting and health-compromising factors in the area using GPS devices. But first, we need your help!

The problem: As you can see in the image, the commercial area of Cap Haitien is fairly well curated in Google Maps, but the densely inhabited areas of Fort Saint Michel and La Petite Anse are not.

How you can help: Street names, businesses, markets, footpaths – if you know it, we want to see it! If you have knowledge of this area of Cap Haitien, we’re asking for you to share your knowledge with the world!

The goal of this project is to discover Kuiper Belt Objects with just the right orbit and just the right characteristics to make them eligible for a visit from the New Horizons mission. At this time, the space probe has enough fuel in reserve to allow up to two different objects to be visited.

This is where you come in. To find these icy KBO targets we need your help poring over thousands of ground based images, taken specially for this purpose using giant telescopes. Hiding within these images are undiscovered slow-moving Kuiper Belt Objects, asteroids zipping through the foreground, and millions of background stars.

The Flusurvey is an online system for measuring influenza trends in the UK.

In contrast to traditional surveillance methods, the Flusurvey collects data directly from the general public, rather than via hospitals or GPs. This is particularly important because many people with flu don't visit a doctor so don't feature in traditional flu surveillance.

Each week, participants report any flu-like symptoms they have experienced since their last visit. If you have no symptoms, this only takes a few seconds. We provide participants with regular updates on the epidemic, all the latest news and advice about flu.

This year, for the first time, we are coordinating with similar surveys in 9 other European countries, letting us monitor flu as it spreads across the continent. You can find out more on the "Join in" tab.

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.

Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that need intensive computational power. The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing Distributed Computation capability using BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing).

Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering, idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to university projects. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others' simulation by its own solutions.

The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!

In the Health Tracking Network, people across the world work together to monitor common illnesses and discover factors related to illness.

When you join the Health Tracking Network, you:
* spend 2-3 minutes per week answering questions about cold and flu symptoms and other topics;
* earn money for charities of your choice; and
* can track your own health, fitness, or anything of interest to you with separate tracking tools.

The Health Tracking Network has no ads, and participation is free and completely anonymous.

We seek volunteers from across the world. You must be 18 years or older to participate.

Download and play the ACTUV Tactics Simulator and submit your results to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Your results will help develop the future of anti-submarine warfare.

Think you can best an enemy submarine commander so he can’t escape into the ocean depths?

If you think you can, you are invited to put yourself into the virtual driver’s seat of one of several Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) configurations and show the world how you can use its capabilities to follow an enemy submarine.

DARPA’s ACTUV program is developing a fundamentally new tool for the Navy’s ASW toolkit and seeks your help to explore how best to use this tool to track quiet submarines. Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous WatersTM game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve.

Give it a try!

Phylo is a game in which participants align sequences of DNA by shifting and moving puzzle pieces. Your score depends on how you arrange these pieces. You will be competing against a computer and other players in the community.

Though it may appear to be just a game, Phylo is actually a framework for harnessing the computing power of mankind to solve a common problem -- Multiple Sequence Alignments.

A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA or protein to identify regions of similarity. These similarities may be consequences of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. From such an alignment, biologists may infer shared evolutionary origins, identify functionally important sites, and illustrate mutation events. More importantly, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases.

Traditionally, multiple sequence alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences. Unfortunately, the use of heuristics do not guarantee global optimization as it would be prohibitively computationally expensive to achieve an optimal alignment. This is due in part to the sheer size of the genome, which consists of roughly three billion base pairs, and the increasing computational complexity resulting from each additional sequence in an alignment.

Humans have evolved to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently. By abstracting multiple sequence alignment to manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, we have adapted the problem to benefit from human capabilities. By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed.

All alignments were generously made available through UCSC Genome Browser. In fact, all alignments contain sections of human DNA which have been speculated to be linked to various genetic disorders, such as breast cancer. Every alignment is received, analyzed, and stored in a database, where it will eventually be re-introduced back into the global alignment as an optimization.

Let's play!

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

CitSci.org is a platform that supports a variety of citizen science programs using a centralized database to store and deliver science data, with a focus on community based monitoring programs. This platform allows program coordinators to create their own projects and datasheets, manage members, define measurements, create analyses, and even write feedback forms.

BirdTrack is a free, online bird recording system for birdwatchers to store and manage their own records from anywhere in Britain and Ireland. Everyone with an interest in birds can get involved by recording when and where they watched birds then completing a list of the species seen and heard during the trip.

Exciting real-time outputs are generated by BirdTrack, including species reporting rate graphs and animated maps of sightings, all freely-available online. The data collected are used by researchers to investigate migration movements and distributions of birds and to support species conservation at local, national and international scales.

BirdTrack is year-round and ongoing, making it an ideal project for getting children enthused about birds and migration. Teachers are encouraged to add their school grounds as a BirdTrack site then help their students to record the birds they see and hear.

The success of BirdTrack relies on YOU. Get started today!

The Salish Sea Hydrophone Network needs volunteers to help monitor the critical habitat of endangered Pacific Northwest killer whales by detecting orca sounds and measuring ambient noise levels. Volunteers are especially needed to help notify researchers when orcas are in the Salish Sea, which encompasses the waters of Puget Sound and the surrounding area.

Sponsored by a coalition of organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Whale Museum in Olympia, Washington, the network consists of five hydrophones, each hooked up to a computer to analyze the signal and stream it via the internet.

Even though software is used to distinguish animal from other underwater sound, human ears do a better job. So volunteers monitor the network from their home computers anywhere in the world, and alert the rest of the network when they hear whale sounds. Sometimes boats or onshore monitors are deployed to observe the whales while they are making sounds. Researchers hope to learn more about the uses of orca communications and whale migration patterns.

Join us in the search for interstellar dust! On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust's dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004; and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to "get their hands" on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny - only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse, the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

This is where you come in!

By asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world, we can do this project in months instead of years. Of course, we can't invite hundreds of people to our lab to do this search-we only have two microscopes! To find the elusive particles , therefore, we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth!

In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle!

Physics Songs aims to be the world's premier website devoted to collecting and organizing all songs about physics. It is managed by Walter F. Smith, Professor of Physics at Haverford College.

Songs about physics can help students to remember critical concepts and formulas, but perhaps more importantly they communicate the lesson that physics can be fun. They certainly help to establish an informal classroom atmosphere, in which even shy students are willing to ask questions.

The songs may also activate a different part of the students' brains.

The Perfect Pitch Test is a study to determine whether absolute pitch differs systematically for different timbres. Your participation involves a brief survey and a pitch-naming test and will make an important contribution to auditory research.

Do you have absolute pitch, the ability to identify or recreate a musical note without any reference? If so, researchers at the Perfect Pitch Test need your help.

Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration needs the help of citizen scientists to observe and classify stars never before classified. The goal is to mine data from photographic images of star spectra, which result from light absorption in the outer surface of a star. Star spectra are made available online where citizen scientists can compare them to stars with known spectra.

Don't wait--be the first to classify one of hundreds of thousands of stars that have never been seen before!

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a group of ham radio operators and other private citizens around the country who have volunteered the use of their weather data for education, research, and use by interested parties. There are currently over 8,000 registered members worldwide and over 500 different user organizations. Their weather data are used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and distributed to user organizations.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a public-private partnership with three main goals:

1. Collect weather data contributed by citizens
2. Make these data available for weather services and homeland security
3. Provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers.

Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.