You don't need to be a '90s-bred Bill Nye fan to know science rules. Just look at the state of the Internet in 2014 -- we f*cking love that sh*t.
Now, thanks to an outpouring of crowdsourcing calls from scientists and universities across the world, "citizen scientists" -- like you, me and our Ph.D.-challenged friends -- can brainstorm and partake in the grunt work for big-scale scientific research. It's a win-win way to help out and get introduced to some of the top researchers in the biz.
For years, scientists from a variety of fields have crowdsourced help from the public: retirees to advocates to former cheerleaders to inmates. But active participants say the social media age has opened up all new doors for its (hopefully ongoing) potential.
So what is a citizen scientist?
It's a good question, with a fairly open-ended answer. Basically, it's anybody who voluntarily contributes his or her time and resources toward scientific research in partnership with professional scientists. Most of the said scientists or research institutions will post their cries for help projects on various websites.
So then I get involved how ...?
Through the power of the Internet, obviously.
One of the biggest online ci-sci communities, the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), officially started in 2009. But its roots trace back two years earlier, to the University College London, where then-student Chis Lintott was working on his Ph.D. on the chemistry of star formation.
The datasets he had to work through were huge -- more than 1 million images of galaxies, he remembers -- and he didn't have the bandwidth to complete the work by himself. After he obtained his Ph.D. and moved to Oxford University, he created the website GalaxyZoo.org as a public shout for help.
"To sort galaxies out by shape, you need to look at them," he says, "and the human eye is much better at picking out faint structure than computers are." So he asked others to keep an eye out, too.
The response from the public was much more enthusiastic than he expected.
He realized he'd be able to ask for help with other problems. Soon, he founded the CSA and partnered with seven institutions, museums and universities from across the globe, all of which rely on the public for assistance. Its members, which include the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the University of Minnesota, post projects ranging from wildlife research to astronomy to archaeology. Anyone interested in getting involved or donating can register with the site.
"Scientific datasets are only going to get larger, and so I don't expect the need for human eyeballs to inspect them to shrink anytime soon," Lintott says. "There's something wonderful about being able to make a little bit of discovery using nothing more than a web browser."
Another citizen pioneer, Darlene Cavalier, founded SciStarter.com in 2006 while she was getting her master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. What started as a blog dedicated to informing policy makers about STEM-related issues quickly turned into a database of more than 800 citizen science projects.
"I was trying to use volunteers in science research as an example of the type of people who should be involved in policy discussions," she says. "I didn't anticipate it turning into a startup."
Visitors can sort through topics on the website, such as archaeology, insects or climate, and narrow searches by location. Researchers, on the other hand, can add projects to the site's finder, with tags so they're easy to search.
"There's something for everybody," Cavalier says. "Don't take it lightly. Researchers really do need help from the public."
Other projects involve even less commitment. George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, created a tool that uses the downtime you're not spending on your computer to power a program for Alzheimer's research.
The team uses a complex system of computer models to study molecules related to the disease. However, the simulations they're producing can take years to complete with their current, limited computing power, so they designed a software that uses the power from other computers once their respective users have gone idle. You can think of it like a screensaver, in that it works when you're not around.
And then, of course, there's Reddit. The subreddit page /r/CitizenScience is chock-full of projects and opportunities, like this:
[img src="http://i.imgur.com/w5wNZ0R.jpg" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Image: TheDrCK
So what about you? Any cool citizen science projects you've been involved with? Share your story with us in the comments.
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