One thing that keeps on surprising me is how often interested lay persons ask about possibilities to assist a scientist in his/her research. Non-scientists are often curious, interested and motivated, and so there is a huge potential for help, support and resources from all those interested folks! In the last two decades, there has been an exciting transformation in how citizens can become part of (and even guide!) scientific research. This is a great evolution, sicne it allows much more science to be done, and could even lead to a completely new funding model for scientific research as illustrated below.
In the mid-nineties, several researchers started developing programs to tap into this huge resource by designing programs for distributed computing — where a large number of home users contribute their computer spare CPU time by running a low-priority calculation, and so form a large and powerful computer network. There is indeed great power in numbers, and coincidentally, one of the first (if not the first) such projects was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project that is (still) searching for so-called Mersenne prime numbers. For many years, I ran a Linux version of the mprime program on all computers that I had access to. One of the stimuli may have been the fact that there was a $100,000 award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the first prime number that has more than 10 million digits. The 45th Mersenne prime number was found in August 2008, and after rigorous verification, confirmed as the prize winner in November 2009. If you’re interested, the number is 243,112,609 – 1 and totals nearly 13 million digits. Interestingly, the 46th Mersenne prime number was found and was named as one of the best inventions of 2008 by Time magazine. Not a bad score for a number!
Since 1999, the University of California at Berkeley has been running another immensely popular distributed computing program called SETI@Home.A cleverly designed screensaver program uses your unused CPU cycles to analyze radio waves and search for possible extraterrestrial signals. This project has attracted well over 5 million users! More and more such projects have surfaced, and it is one way for scientists to access computing resources that are otherwise unaffordable. A great example is the world community grid which aims to be the world’s largest computer grid (more than half a million users to date), and which is funded and operated by IBM to support humanitarian research. If you’re looking for some honorable projects to donate your computer time to, go have a look! You could help find a cure for cancer!
More recently, social networks and mobile technology have played a big role in the success of a whole new series of citizen science projects. 2006 saw the launch of the Stardust@Home project, once more by UC Berkeley. This time, scientists weren’t looking for your spare CPU cycles, but asked you to scan microscope images to find interstellar dust particles in an aerogel. Why? Because the human brain is much much better at this than a computer is. Inspired by this approach, the Galaxy Zoo project took off in 2007 where now your help was asked to classify galaxies. The project was such a success that a whole series of similar projects is now hosted under the name Zooniverse — from galaxy classification to searching for interstellar gas bubbles to hunting for planets or finding targets for the New Horizons spacecraft once it’s done with Pluto. The Zooniverse project has now even expanded to include climate research, whale research and studies about the lives of ancient Greeks! More than 600,000 volunteers participate — and anyone can, since no science education is needed. There is in the meantime a long list of papers in the literature describing new discoveries done by these sorts of projects. In Astronomy 1021, we offer some of these as projects, and many students absolutely love the idea of taking part!
Very recently, I found out about another type of citizen involvement in research, this time through actively contributing research funding: petridish.org. It goes like this: scientists propose projects and include rewards for whoever backs their proposal up financially at a certain level. Citizens can pledge whatever amount they see fit for whatever project they like. Again, large numbers that contribute small amounts make enough for funding your research! Who knows, maybe soon we’ll all be posting our research proposals on facbook!