Physics

AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. Each AirCasting session lets you capture real-world measurements, annotate the data to tell your story, and share it via the CrowdMap.

Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share:
(o) sound levels recorded by their phone microphone;
(o) temperature, humidity, CO and NO2 gas concentrations recorded by the Arduino-powered AirCasting Air Monitor, and;
(o) heart rate measurements recorded by the Zephyr HxM.

Using AirCasting Luminescence, these sensor streams can also be represented using LED lights.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, plans to fly citizen-science experiments on fully reusable suborbital spacecraft that are now being developed by US companies.

Citizens in Space has acquired an initial contract for 10 flights with XCOR Aerospace, the Mojave, California-based company that is developing the Lynx spacecraft. It expects to acquire additional flights from XCOR and other companies in the future.

Citizens in Space is currently training three astronaut candidates to fly as operators. It will select and train seven additional astronaut candidates over the next 12 to 24 months. Citizens in Space is also inviting citizen scientists to build 100 experiments to fly on those flights, which are expected to begin in late 2013 or early 2014.

In addition to the general call for experiments, Citizens in Space will offer a cash prize for certain experiments deemed to be of special importance.

The Solar Hydrogen Activity Research Kit (SHArK) Project gives you the tools to discover a storable form of solar energy.

Solar energy is the only option for producing the renewable carbon-free power needed to power the planet. However, because the sun doesn't shine at night, it is critical that we develop a method to store the energy for night. Producing hydrogen from sunlight and water is an ideal solution to the storage problem.

The SHArK Project uses the process of photoelectrolysis, whereby certain metal oxides are used with solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Currently, no known stable material is capable of efficiently and inexpensively photoelectrolyzing water with visible light. There are, however, millions of untested compounds that might.

This is where students can take the reigns and contribute to real and meaningful science. The SHArK project provides inexpensive kits that include inkjet printers, laser pointers, and LEGOs® to allow students a fun and engaging way to explore chemistry and contribute potential solutions to the world’s energy problem.

Harness the power of the sun with the SHArK Project!

Do you have an Astronomy Story to tell? Create interactive, narrated tours about your favorite astronomical objects in WorldWide Telescope, and share them with the world.

Solitary bees and wasps in your own backyard!!!

Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping (and wasp-keeping!).

Here at University of Florida Native Buzz you can keep track of your own native buzz nest site and see the results of other participant’s nest sites.

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!

SOHO is the most successful comet discoverer in history, having found over one thousand eight-hundred comets in over thirteen years of operation! What's even more impressive is that the majority of these comets have been found by amateur astronomers and enthusiasts from all over the world, scouring the images for a likely comet candidate from the comfort of their own home.

Absolutely anyone can join this project -- all you need is an internet connection and plenty of free time!

Science Hack Day is a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building 'cool stuff'. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It's time for a Hack Day focused on science!

Watershed Watch increases the understanding of New Mexico's water quality, river ecology and fisheries health through hands-on science in a real-world context. Students gather data on biological, chemical and physical indicators and make presentations to local data users including acequias (irrigation canals), school boards, federal agencies and watershed groups. Students become engaged in environmental studies of issues beyond the classroom to that address critical water issues in local regions.

The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford is building a sound map of the world as part of a new study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. We need your help!

We’re asking people across the world to use our new iOS app on their iPhones or iPads (or any recorder) to record short clips from different sound environments, or "soundscapes"--anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping centre. Then we ask volunteers to comment on their soundscapes and upload them to our virtual soundscape map.

Recordings and responses will be analyaed by acoustic scientists, and significant findings will be reported on this website.

Sound Around You aims to raise awareness of how our soundscape influences us, and could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.

Orca Project volunteers in Port Townsend, Washington document orca bones for an online bone atlas, assist in orca education with children's groups, take part in assembling a full-size skeleton for display, participate in the design of a new orca exhibit and conduct research on underwater sounds using a hydrophone.

The project’s goals are to improve public awareness of the challenges faced by killer whales--toxic contamination, underwater noise pollution, and diminishing food supplies in the Puget Sound--as well as develop an appreciation for the whales’ remarkable social bonds and communication abilities.

Funded by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, other organizations, and matching funds, the Orca Project will focus on both the transient and resident killer whales seen in the Northwest United States.

The Orca Project will also offer public lectures, free science classes for Olympic Peninsula students, tours of articulated whale skeletons for school classes, hands-on activities for after-school groups, Bring Your Bones Day (a community event with resident experts helping identify and reveal the mysteries of bones), and focused outreach to the maritime and marine community of Port Townsend, Washington.

Using small telescopes around the world, Global Telescope Network members observe and analyze astronomical objects related to the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST), Swift, and XMM-Newton missions.

These missions are designed to study astronomical objects through their emission of x-rays and gamma rays. But much can be learned by combining observations over a broad range in the electromagnetic spectrum. So, the Global Telescope Network has been assembled to make observations in the optical range to complement the observations by space-borne observatories.

Members can participate in a number of activities, including gamma-ray burst photometry analysis, surveillance data analysis, and galaxy monitoring, and by donating telescope time. The Global Telescope Network in turn provides involvement for students, teachers, and amateur astronomers in cutting-edge astronomical research. It also offers mentoring in research practices, telescope use, data analysis, and educational resources.

INSPIRE volunteers use build-it-yourself kits to measure and record very low frequency radio emissions. These include naturally occurring "sferics" (short for "atmospherics") often generated by lightning and known as "tweeks," "whistlers," and "chorus" as well as man-made emissions.

There is a great deal of scientific curiosity about the nature and generation mechanisms of natural very low frequency radio emissions and how they interact with the Earth's ionosphere and magnetic fields. INSPIRE is taking an active role in furthering the investigation of very low frequency emissions by involving citizen volunteers in its research.

INSPIRE represents a rare opportunity to work with real NASA space scientists on real scientific problems.

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.

A recent issue of Make magazine (http://makezine.com/15/) was devoted to build-them-yourself, high-tech musical instruments. Among the most impressive is a laser harp invented by tech musician Stephen Hobley.

You coax out the computer-generated sounds by waving your hands to break the light beams and change their lengths.

To build a laser harp, you’ll need to be comfortable with such things as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology, circuit boards, photo cells, voltage regulators, and computers. If you’re not a serious amateur music technologist who’s been tinkering for years in the garage, you’ll need to buy or collect a significant amount of hardware and software.

Stephen’s article in Make does include a simpler project—a single-beam “laser theremin,” as opposed to the six-beam laser harp. But even that’s a pretty complex gizmo.

Related Material:
* To see and hear Stephen playing his harp, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCgMsrSaYwY&feature=player_embedded.
* Build a Laser Harp, Make Music With Light (Science Cheerleader): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2008/10/build_a_laser_harp_make_music_with_light/

LHC@home is a volunteer grid computing program that enables you to contribute idle time on your computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

LHC@home will leverage your computer's processing power, disk space, and network bandwidth, along with thousands of other computers over the Internet. Through this combined computing power, physics researchers around the world can better analyze and store massive amounts of critical scientific data.

The National Science Digital Library encourages citizens to help enlarge and strengthen their library of high quality resources and tools that support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Developers of content in these subject areas, National Science Foundation grantees, educators and learners, and all other members of the community are welcome to recommend digital resources for the library. These resources include activities, lesson plans, Web sites, simulations, or any materials that help educators meet the demands of an increasingly complex technology-based world.

As a national network of learning environments, resources, and partnerships, the National Science Digital Library seeks to serve a vital role in educational cyberlearning for the nation, meeting the informational and technological needs of educators and learners at all levels.

Crayon Physics is an innovative physics puzzle game in which you get to experience what it would be like if drawings you create on your computer were magically transformed into real physical objects. Through 70 levels, your success relies on nothing but your imagination, creativity, and ability to wield a miniature crayon.