As part of our ongoing series, “Citizen Science Test Drive,” first-person reviews of citizen science apps, platforms, tools and projects, we present a guest post from Hal Hodson, a science and technology journalist, based in London, UK.

There’s a misconception about astronomy, and it’s to do with the telescopes. Tell someone that you’ve got a degree in astrophysics and they’ll likely start asking questions about all your romantic late nights training telescopes to the skies, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, one star at a time. The Arecibo Dish, Mauna Kea, Chile’s desert-based and imaginatively named Very Large Telescope; they all lend astronomy a dramatic figure – late nights, just you and the universe.That’s not quite the truth.

Only the most masterful astrophysicists have any say in the operation of the most magnificent telescopes, although it’s true that anyone can do science in their back garden with smaller scale set up. Now the internet lets anyone flex their astronomer’s muscles online, applying their brain to help professional scientists analyze images from some of the world’s cutting edge telescopes. It’s called Zooniverse, a collection of astronomical citizen science projects which facilitates anyone with an internet connection and a computer to increase our understanding of galaxies, the Sun, Moon, supernovae, nebulae, and even exoplanets.

I start off with analyzing merging galaxies, million of stars flowing together, interacting gravitationally to form new shapes. When two spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way come together, it’s thought to result in a elliptical galaxy – a spheroid ball of stars. By picking the computer-modelled merger which best matches pictures of an actual galaxy merger, I can help astronomers refine their models.The website itself is simple, but works seamlessly. You need to make an account, but it takes 15 seconds with an email address and password. There’s no email confirmation, so you’re free to go straight to the science after sign up. Each project comes with a tutorial explaining how to use the application, or you can just dive right in. For instance, the Planet Hunters project gets you classifying light curves right away, but there is a tutorial available. (A light curve is a measurement of the light emitted by stars as their brightness varies, either due to planets or other stars crossing the stellar face, or natural variability ). Beyond just the satisfaction of contributing, you can also track your progress – how many stars you have classified, how many potential planets you’ve found.

I’m pretty excited about trying a project called “Search for exploding stars”. I’ll be finding candidate supernovas in sky surveys taken by the Palomar Observatory in California, candidates which astronomers may then follow up. But there’s a problem, the 640,000 people taking part in Zooniverse projects worldwide have polished off the Palomar data – all the supernova candidates have been found. Zooniverse informs me of this with a pop-up, and suggests I try “Solar Stormwatch“, which asks me to spot solar storms in images from Nasa’s STEREO spacecraft. The implementation of projects on Zooniverse is quite varied. Solar Stormwatch comes with a very slick interface, with great training on how to spot and measure solar storms. The galaxy merger project is much simpler, just asking me to pick best matches, requiring almost no training.

Behind all of the projects, the Zooniverse platform itself keeps track of your actions, measuring your progress across each one. Zooniverse also has a couple of outlier projects: using old shipping logs to model Earth’s climate; categorizing killer whale songs; even helping SETI look for alien signals in data from the Kepler mission. What’s so intriguing about the platform is that it harnesses your brain’s computational power and analytical ability to do things that even super computers can’t. In a world where software and hardware are doing more and more, it’s nice to know that old fashioned human brains are good for something.

This is a guest blog post from Jennifer Fee, K-12 Programs Manager, at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Calling all educators:  if you’ve participated in citizen science projects, we need your ideas for a book we are writing!  Citizen science is different from the traditional ‘cookbook’ approach to science education, and we’d like to know how you and your students take part so that we can inspire other teachers to give citizen science a try!
 
Citizen science projects can bring science to life, motivating students with their relevance.  As they make observations, collect data, and view their findings, students connect to the natural world and experience science as dynamic and engaging. Plus, participating in citizen science is a great “question generator,” inspiring curiosity and potentially leading to student investigations. Whether a project on birds, butterflies, bullfrogs, or beyond—based on one organism or whole ecological communities—we’d like to know how you teach science content and process skills through citizen science projects…
• Science topics such as habitats, life cycles, adaptation, migration, and interrelationships between living organisms and their physical environment
• Process skills such as turning questions into hypotheses, thinking about variables, interpreting and representing data, and sharing work with other students and professional scientists
 
Please share you lesson for consideration in our Birds, Butterflies, Bullfrogs, and Beyond book, which will be published in 2013 by NSTA Press!  If your lesson is selected, you’ll become a published author and get a free copy of the book. Deadline to submit lessons is May 15, 2012. You can find out how to submit at this link.

 

As originally posted on USGS.gov:

RESTON, Va. — Thanks to citizen-scientists around the country, the USA National Phenology Network hit a major milestone this week by reaching its one millionth nature observation.

The millionth observation was done by Lucille Tower, a citizen-scientist in Portland, Ore., who entered a record about seeing maple vines flowering. Her data, like all of the entries, came in through USA-NPN’s online observation program, Nature’s Notebook, which engages more than 4,000 volunteers across the country to observe and record phenology – the timing of the recurring life events of plants and animals such as when cherry trees or lilacs blossom, when robins build their nests, when salmon swim upstream to spawn or when leaves turn colors in the fall.

Each record not only represents a single data point — the status of a specific life stage of an individual plant or animal on one day – but also benefits both science and society by helping researchers understand how plants and animals are responding to climate change and, in turn, how those responses are affecting people and ecological systems.

“My dream is that through the wonders of modern technology and the National Phenology Network we could turn the more than six billion people on the planet into components of our scientific observing system,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “We could make giant leaps in science education, improve the spatial and temporal coverage of the planet, lower the cost of scientific data collection, and all while making ordinary citizens feel a part of the scientific process.”

Jake Weltzin, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and the executive director of USA-NPN, concurs. “Hitting the one millionth observation is exciting because researchers and decision-makers need more information to understand and respond to our rapidly changing planet. More information means better-informed decisions that ensure the continued vitality of our natural areas that we all depend on and enjoy.”

Read the full article, here.

goal: Help seismologists detect and warn of earthquakes.

task: Do a 1 minute cheer with your class and measure the shaking of your classroom.

Join the Big Cheer for Science and Engineering on April 27, 2012 at 1:30 pm ET, presented by SciStarter, Science Cheerleader, the USGS, the Iris Consortium, Discover Magazine and the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Anchored at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC, this one minute cheer will include plenty of stomping and shaking in an effort to get kids jazzed about science AND measure seismic activity caused by their cheer! By downloading the free software as instructed, your classroom can become part of a national network to help researchers at the USGS detect future earthquakes!

In Washington, DC, dozens of Science Cheerleaders (scientists and engineers–who also happen to be cheerleaders for the Redskins, Wizards and Ravens among other NFL and NBA teams) will lead a one minute cheer for science with 10,000 students at the DC Convention center. While they’re doing the cheer in DC, hundreds of schools across the country will do the same cheer at the same time. In fact, Mayor Nutter will lead the Big Cheer in Philadelphia and several Science Cheerleaders will be in local schools to lead the cheer.

During the cheer, you can have your students record your local ground movement and share it with other participating schools for comparison. Comparisons can be further made to how much the ground shakes during the Big Cheer at the Washington D.C. Convention Center and in your classroom and to how much it shakes during an actual earthquake.

To measure the shaking of your Big Cheer, all you need is a smart phone, a Mac or IBM Thinkpad laptop, or one of the Quake Catch Network sensors that connects to a computer’s USB port. Each of these devices has an accelerometer inside that can record ground motion in three dimensions. The software is simple to download and install.

Learn more and get started here on the Big Cheer for Science project page!

Thank you,

Come join the SciStarter team at that “Woodstock of Science,” the Philadelphia Science Festival this Saturday, April 21st. Stroll along the beautiful Ben Franklin Parkway amid hundreds of hands-on science experiments and exhibits! And, on Tuesday, 4/24, meet SciStarter founder Darlene Cavalier, Azavea (creators of Philly Tree Map, see below) CEO Robert Cheetham, and SciStarter contributor and birder extraodonaire Kate Atkins when they talk about citizen engagement in science at WHYY TV as part of the Philly Tech Week celebration! RSVP to this free event, here.

But first, on Saturday at the Philadelphia Science Festival, your SciStarter team will host our own exhibit (Booth 11 in the Blue Zone) featuring two different opportunities to participate in hands-on scientific research. Come say hello and check out our cool featured projects, including:

Mastodon Matrix Project In 1999 a yard project led the Lozler family of Hyde Park, NY to discover a nearly intact 14,000 year old mastodon skeleton. Now you can help scientists understand the ecology of the late Pleistocene era by sifting through the actual matrix (”dirt”) it was found in. Sign up to have some of the matrix mailed directly to your house so you can sift through it on a hunt for bits of shell, bone and plants. Your findings will be shared with the Paleontological Research Institution and combined with the work of thousands of other citizen scientists for an emerging picture of the environment in which mastodons once thundered.

PhillyTreeMap What is the economic and environmental benefit of the tree in front of your home? PhillyTreeMap will help you find out through this open-source, web-based map database of trees in the Philadelphia region. And they need your help identifying and cataloging other trees in Philadelphia’s urban forest.

We hope to see you on Saturday at the Philadelphia Science Festival and on Tuesday at the Philly Tech Week event!

This is a guest blog post by SciStarter contributor Jacqueline Lewis (who will also be at the Philadelphia Science Festival!).

Registration is open for the Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research (citizen science, volunteer monitoring, community-based research, crowd science).

August 4th and 5th, 2012 in Portland, Oregon.

$30 with registration for ESA meeting, $95 for this event only.

Now accepting poster abstracts and scholarship applications until May 4, 2012.

With the rapid growth and innovation of public participation in scientific research, researchers and 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 welcomes relevant insights from diverse fields.

The conference aims to engage a broad range of participants through a call for posters, open now. Those in need of financial support to attend are encouraged to apply for scholarships. Go to CitizenScience.org/conference/2012 now!

May 4, 2012 deadline for poster abstracts and scholarship applications

June 14, 2012 deadline for ESA early bird registration rates

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently announced the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” This may be of interest to researchers and practitioners of crowd sourcing and citizen science.

For example, as part of this effort, the National Science Foundation will fund a $10 million Expeditions in Computing project based at the University of California, Berkeley, that will integrate three powerful approaches for turning data into information – machine learning, cloud computing, and crowd sourcing.

Here’s more from Tom Kalil via the OSTP blog:

Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.”  By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.

To launch the initiative, six Federal departments and agencies will announce more than $200 million in new commitments that, together, promise to greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data. Learn more about ongoing Federal government programs that address the challenges of, and tap the opportunities afforded by, the big data revolution in our Big Data Fact Sheet.

We also want to challenge industry, research universities, and non-profits to join with the Administration to make the most of the opportunities created by Big Data.  Clearly, the government can’t do this on its own.  We need what the President calls an “all hands on deck” effort.

Some companies are already sponsoring Big Data-related competitions, and providing funding for university research.  Universities are beginning to create new courses—and entire courses of study—to prepare the next generation of “data scientists.”  Organizations like Data Without Borders are helping non-profits by providing pro bono data collection, analysis, and visualization.  OSTP would be very interested in supporting the creation of a forum to highlight new public-private partnerships related to Big Data.

Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy at OSTP

How can social media be used to accomplish a seemingly impossible task? Today, a social experiment called the “Tag Challenge” sends 5 individuals to roam the streets of New York, DC, Bratislava, Stockholm, and London. The task is to locate them before the sun sets based only on their mugshots. You can contribute by taking and uploading pictures of these individuals if you see them, or even just inviting others to participate!
The $5000 prize will be distributed among the participants, to those who submit pictures as well as those who recruit.

For the CrowdScanner team (which includes SciStarter),  the challenge is a chance to study how information propagates through social networks and what it takes for a message to go viral. The lessons we  learn will help us understand successes and failures of social media in recent events. You can become part of the challenge and help the study by joining our team at www.crowdscanner.net

For more info, or to sign up, go to:
http://bit.ly/H4JXtG

Who’s the CrowdScanner team?
The team consists of a group of researchers from MIT, UCSD, Masdar Institute, and University of Southampton (including the guys who won the Red Balloon challenge).

What’s Tag Challenge?
Tag Challenge is a competition to acquire pictures of 5 volunteers, each in public in a different major city, in a single day. Due to its geographically distributed nature, the competition can only be won by the crowd-sourced efforts of people like you and me. More at http://www.tag-challenge.com

This is a guest blog post by Dr. Josh Neufeld, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on understanding microbial diversity through next-generation sequencing, characterizing the function of uncultured microbes, and better understanding nitrogen cycling in terrestrial and aquatic environments.

Sergei Winogradsky discovered nitrifying bacteria in 1890, recognizing that these microbes convert ammonia to nitrate (via nitrite). In aquatic environments, ammonia toxicity to fish is avoided almost exclusively due to the activity of these bacteria…or so it was thought. The ability to remove (or oxidize) ammonia was discovered recently in Archaea, which are an entirely different group of microbes from the bacteria. This discovery overturned a century of dogma regarding nitrogen cycling in the environment.

In 2009, I was beginning a study of wastewater treatment plants and the roles of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA). To test our protocols, I asked an asked an undergraduate assistant to test our DNA-based detection assay on a sample of sponge filter. Having worked in a large Montreal pet store selling fish for 10 years, I was well aware that AOB were assumed to metabolize ammonia that fish produce. The initial test results from my office were shocking: we could not detect AOB in the filter. Instead, our assay demonstrated lots (and lots!) of AOA DNA.

To confirm this initial observation, we  wanted access to aquariums – dozens of them. For this, we needed help from citizen scientists! We didn’t need to go far. The Kitchener Waterloo Aquarium Society (KWAS) is a large group of hobbyists that meet monthly in a local community centre. We contacted them ahead of their upcoming meeting and requested as many filter samples as we could get, providing careful instructions for sampling both filter and water samples. We also visited aquarium stores in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge; these unsuspecting store managers became voluntary citizen scientists as well.

The results from the aquarium filter in my office were reflected in the aquarium filters we sampled. AOA were dominant ammonia oxidizers in most of the filters – AOB were not detected at all in nearly half of the freshwater aquarium filters. Interestingly, aquaria with higher concentrations of ammonia (overfed, overstocked) had higher proportions of AOB.

So, what started as a test of our protocol on an office filter turned into an exciting citizen science pilot project. Along with my graduate student, Laura Sauder, we returned to KWAS with our results, acknowledged them in our publication in PLoS ONE, and will publish a summary of our study in the next issue of their newsletter. We are also working to expand the citizen science study (stay tuned) to see if we can identify factors that influence the diversity and composition of AOA communities, using aquariums as controlled and distinct microenvironments.

Citizen science is the only way this research would be possible.

Sign up for the SciStarter Newsletter!

Amateur science enthusiasts can join forces with top researchers through Your Research Mission—a new partnership between DISCOVER Magazine and SciStarter.com.

NEW YORK, NY. (March 1, 2012) – A “citizen science” movement is sweeping the country. Now, amateur enthusiasts who want to collaborate with leading scientists can visit DiscoverMagazine.com to join cutting-edge research projects.

DISCOVER is teaming up with SciStarter.com to present Your Research Mission, a dynamic project showcase. Each week, it will feature curated citizen science tasks, ranging from analyzing distant galaxies to monitoring frog, firefly and whale populations, to detecting home and body microbiomes. The projects will make it simple for everyone to jump in and get their hands dirty with science.

“This partnership moves DISCOVER into the fast-growing realm of citizen science,” says Corey S. Powell, Editor in Chief of DISCOVER magazine. “Our readers tell us they’re eager to help study and explore the world, but it can be difficult for them to know where to begin. Now we’ll be offering projects vetted, sorted and aggregated by SciStarter to our two million monthly online visitors.”

“DISCOVER has enormous credibility in the scientific community. Its print and online readers are enthusiastic and intelligent, and their participation in research projects will be invaluable to researchers,” adds Darlene Cavalier, Founder of SciStarter.

Select SciStarter projects will be featured on DiscoverMagazine.com each day beginning in March. Researchers and team leaders who want their project featured can submit it to the SciStarter.com Project Finder for consideration by the SciStarter editors.

About SciStarter.com

SciStarter aims to enable people to contribute to science through informal recreational activities and formal research efforts. The website creates a shared space where scientists can talk with citizens interested in working on or learning about their research projects.

Darlene Cavalier founded both SciStarter and Science Cheerleader.com, a popular blog that works through NFL and NBA cheerleaders-turned-scientists and engineers to promote science literacy and to involve citizens in science and science-related policy.

About DISCOVER

DISCOVER makes science entertaining and understandable through beautiful writing, stunning images, and clear explanations. The monthly magazine covers all of science, from astronomy to human origins to the environment. DiscoverMagazine.com is one of the top science destinations on the Internet, with more than two million monthly visitors. It features daily science news coverage, image and video galleries, and a lineup of popular science blogs including Bad Astronomy, The Loom, and Not Exactly Rocket Science.