Computers & Technology

When someone collapses and stops breathing, an automated external defibrillator or AED can save their life. In Philadelphia, PA, a city with about 1.5 million people, AEDs are all around us. Near our homes, workplaces, and even grocery stores! Currently there is no comprehensive map and as a result AEDs are often not used when they are most needed. With the crowdsourced information we collect from our contest, we will build a map of AED locations in Philadelphia which can inform 911 services and the public.

There are three ways to play:

1. Find and photograph the most AEDs in Philadelphia County in four weeks (starting mid-January 2012) and win the $10,000 grand prize. The team or individual that finds the most "confirmed," "eligible" AEDs by the contest end date will receive the grand prize of $10,000.

2. Be the first to submit a photograph of a "Golden"AED and win $50. We have identified between 20 and 200 AEDs in Philadelphia County as "Golden" AEDs. These are unmarked and you won't know it's a winner when you photograph it.

3. Want to help but not compete for a prize? Submit addresses of locations without AEDs or that you wish had an AED - this is just for fun and it will help us with our map.

Read the Scistarter interview with the lead researcher here: http://scistarter.com/blog/2012/01/spot-the-most-defibrillators-in-philly-win-10k/

With your help, OpenSignalMaps is creating a comprehensive database of cell phone towers, cell phone signal strength readings, and Wi-Fi access points around the world. This data is collected via an Android application and uploaded to the project's servers, taking care to use as little processing power and battery life as possible.

You can use the project website to browse the data they've collected, including heat maps that show exactly how strong signal is in any particular area, as well as all the nearby towers for your carrier. And don't worry -- the data is stripped of any identifying information and available on a graphical interface to enable you to make sense of the raw data.

Bumble bees are important pollinators, and science needs YOUR help to conserve them. You can contribute to our knowledge of bumble bees and their lives all over the world. Your contribution will tell us about which bumble bees live where, the flowers they visit, and when they're active during the year. The photo group is administered by Athena Rayne Anderson, a doctoral candidate in Ecology at the University of Georgia, and author of the website www.pollinators.info.

Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of spring through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events. Find migration maps, pictures, standards-based lesson plans, activities and information to help students make local observations and fit them into a global context. Widely considered a best-practices model for education, Journey North is the nation's premiere "citizen science" project for children. The general public is welcome to participate.

We need your help to make our project a success! Our Jacobs Technology Inc. Agent-Based and Complex Systems (ABC) groupi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has won a project with the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) as part of the Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program. Our “INterrelated FOrecasts Reflecting Models behind Experts' Decisions” (INFORMED) project seeks ways to aggregate forecasts from multiple knowledgeable subjects to yield a group forecast that is more accurate than any individual. We are developing novel concepts that go well beyond the traditional aggregation or Delphi methods you may be familiar with. The forecasts deal with the kinds of topics about which you probably have some knowledge and interest: politics, economics, the development of science and technology, social events, and public health issues.

This project was recently mentioned as the most exciting technology IARPA is working on! Be part of it!

We need your help and participation to assure the success of this project. So we are asking you to participate and share your knowledge on relevant world and U.S. issues. We need as many people as possible to collect sufficient data to develop and prove our forecasting methodology. Besides that, you will have fun testing your knowledge and observing how well we (you) perform in predicting real world events.

WeSolver was created to define and address the most important problems that face human beings. It was made for everyone, a gift to the solvers in the world and anyone can help in any way they are willing to.

There will be many ways to participate in the site itself from creating, reading, promoting, linking, sharing and policing content. WeSolver will be open and transparent to everyone while respecting any individuals wish to remain anonymous should they so choose. Hopefully people will find new connections and relationships between seemingly different problems and solutions inspiring experimentation and innovative approaches.

How can we possibly solve the many problems that face us as a species without using every available asset to do so? How can we leave this work in the hands of experts or governments or any other organization to solve on their own? It would be foolish to ignore the potential solutions which come when everyone is invited to the table. Our common future depends on it.

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.

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.

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!

GreenprintMaps presents the urban forest of the Greenprint region – Sacramento, Yolo, Placer, El Dorado, Sutter, and Yuba Counties. Everyone is invited to join us in mapping all of our trees – in parks, on streets, at schools, in parking lots and at home. You can find trees, add trees, ask a question about a tree, and calculate the value of a tree. GreenprintMaps is fun and easy for everyone. Cities can better manage their trees, planners can protect trees, scientists can combat tree pests and diseases, and homeowners can share their tree stories. We hope you’ll help us grow the best regional urban forest in the nation.

Play your part and help discover our Universe!
Have a computer? Want to help astronomers make awesome discoveries and understand our Universe? Then theSkyNet needs you!
Your computer is bored. It has spare computing power nearly all the time that could be used to do something cool. So why not let it?
By connecting 100s and 1000s of computers together through the Internet, it's possible to simulate a single machine capable of doing some pretty amazing stuff. That's what theSkyNet is all about - using your spare computing power to process radio astronomy data.

SingAboutScience.org has a searchable database which teachers and others can use to find content-rich songs on specific scientific and mathematical topics. Finding and cataloguing all relevant songs is a challenge, however, and volunteers can be used to help with this. Other possible work might entail technical development of the website and assessment of its usability.

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!

The Musical Moods experiment for National Science & Engineering Week UK is a sound experiment which aims to find out what you think the mood is of BBC TV theme tunes, past and present. It aims to find out whether there are new ways of classifying online TV content through the mood of the music rather than the programme genre.

Wherever you are – anywhere in the world – contribute to science by taking a photo of a blank white piece of paper!

Photos are needed on the following dates:

September 17 and 18, 2011
September 23, 2011
November 6, 2011
December 12, 2011
February 4, 2012
March 20, 2012
May 5, 2012
June 20, 2012
August 6, 2012
September 22, 2012
November 5, 2012

Your photo will used to measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back from the Earth -- our planet's "albedo." It's one way scientists can monitor how much energy – and heat – is being absorbed by our planet. By contributing to the Albedo Project, you will be providing data that can be used to examine the similarities and differences of reflectivity around the world.

Should grassy surfaces have the same value in Brazil as in Norway? How does clay soil in the southeastern USA differ from sandy desert in the southwestern USA? Is there any difference in urban “hot spots” that can be attributed to latitude?

Individuals, schools, small and large groups can all use these data to help inform activities that are appropriate and effective for their communities. Whether it is maintaining the health of parks and green spaces, or legislating green building codes, there is something each can do. It is the hope of this project to present some of the actions taken, as well as follow their albedo records over time.

Help identify and catalog the trees in Philadelphia's urban forest! PhillyTreeMap is an open-source, web-based map database of trees in the greater 13-county 3-state Philadelphia region. The wiki-style database enables non-profits, government, volunteer organizations, and the general public to collaboratively create an accurate and informative inventory of the trees in their communities. The project was funded by a USDA Small Business Innovation Research Grant and is in support of the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation's 30% tree canopy goal and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's "Plant One Million" campaign. As more trees are added to the database, PhillyTreeMap uses the iTree software from the USDA Forest Service to calculate the environmental impact of the region's urban forest. So get outside and add some trees!

The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography has been funded by the Georgia Coastal Zone Management Program to assess the distribution of wrack in the salt marshes of coastal Georgia. Marsh wrack is the dead marsh grass that forms large layers on top of the water or the marsh surface.

The project will map the distribution for a number of different years from aerial photographs to determine how much wrack is present in coastal Georgia and where wrack is found in different seasons. The project also aims to study how long wrack persists in a variety of marsh settings.

To do this, the project needs citizen scientists to help document marsh wrack sites. Volunteers will do the following activities:

1. Identify site or sites that you can document at least weekly by taking photos.
2. Gather latitude/longitude location data for each site.

Anyone who helps out will get a copy on the final results of the study and acknowledgement of their help in the text

The Seeker, Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N), is looking for approaches to using games and/or game dynamics applications to inspire adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease and other chronic illnesses to create and maintain their own health.

TuAnalyze is an application for recording and sharing measures of your diabetes. The application allows those touched by diabetes to track, share and compare their health information. Contributions will help advance diabetes care and public health response.

TuAnalyze is available to any TuDiabetes community member. The application supports sharing of diabetes information throughout the community and feedback of community-level diabetes information to users.

You can learn more about your diabetes by viewing information on your TuAnalyze app in the My Apps section of your profile. You can compare personal measures of your diabetes to community measures on the TuAnalyze map.

The TuAnalyze app is jointly developed by Children's Hospital Boston and TuDiabetes.org.

Redwood Watch needs volunteers to take photographs of redwood trees and submit them to researchers. Your data will help researchers understand where redwoods survive and help track redwood forest migration over time.

If you spot a redwood in a park, your own backyard, or in a botanical garden, snap a picture and submit it online. You can use a digital camera, or the Redwood Watch iPhone application, powered by iNaturalist.

Scientists don't yet know how climate change will impact the redwood forest. By understand where redwoods grow well today, scientists can better predict where the redwood forests of will thrive in the future. Join Redwood Watch and help redwoods survive!

The project is a partnership between the Save the Redwoods League, iNaturalist.org, Google Earth Outreach, and the California Academy of Sciences.

NoiseTube needs citizen scientists to monitor noise pollution. Participants install a free mobile application on their cell phone and measure the level of noise in their area.

Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. (Noise can change the balance in predator /prey detection and navigation among migratory species, among other detrimental effects.) This is your chance to turn your mobile phone into an environmental sensor and make an important contribution to science.

Your data will be shared with the NoiseTube community through a collective map of noise pollution. Local governments, city planners, researchers, and others will be able to access and analyze the data.

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!

Digitalkoot needs volunteers to fix mistakes in the index of old Finnish newspapers. And you do this by playing games! Your participation will greatly increase the accuracy of text-based searches of the newspaper archives.

Most of the information in the National Library of Finland's newspaper archives has already been copied into computer databases using computerized text recognition. The problem is that computers fail to recognize all the words. Especially when the quality of the source material is poor, the results need to be fixed by hand. This requires a lot of manual work.

The goal of the project is to index the National Library of Finland's enormous archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access Finland's cultural heritage.

Digitalkoot is run by the National Library of Finland and Microtask.

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!

We are looking for volunteers for our upcoming Yuri's Education Day event at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View this April 8, 2011 as we honor the 50th anniversary of the first astronaut who entered into space, Yuri Gagarin. This upcoming year, we are expecting more than 6,000 attendees from the greater San Francisco Bay Area to join together in a one-of-a-kind experience, and we are excited to create an innovative and interactive learning environment with your help!

On April 8th, from 9am-3pm, bay area educators and students are invited to participate in a free educational extravaganza of science, art, math, technology, engineering, sustainability, and space-related fun. Join us in hosting thousands of elementary, middle, high school, and college students from around the San Francisco Bay Area in an eclectic learning experience featuring presentations, workshops, interactive exhibits, and hands-on activities by prominent scientists, visionaries, space-enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs from multiple disciplines.

PowerSleuth meets PowerMeter invites teachers and students in Maine to examine electricity data and help homeowners monitor how much electricity they’re using while they’re using it.

You’ll engage in a series of investigations and activities using these new tools and other resources to answer questions about home electricity use. Along the way you’ll learn more about electricity - how it’s measured, how customers are charged for their use and how much electricity common household appliances use. As you engage in this work, be sure to keep a good science notebook; record your ideas, what you’re finding out, and the new questions you have. You’ll use your findings to make recommendations for conserving electricity.

Electricity is one of the few things we use first and pay for later. Throughout the month people use electricity in their homes for many different things. At the end of the month, the homeowner receives a bill for the total amount of electricity used during the previous month. The appliances in our homes aren’t marked with price tags so we don’t know as we turn them on them how much electricity they use. Another thing that makes it difficult to keep track of how much electricity our homes are using is we can’t see electricity!

Join the PowerSleuth Meets PowerMeter project and learn a few simple things you and your family can do to save energy.

Let's get started!

Eye on Earth brings together scientific information on air and water quality with feedback and observations from millions of ordinary people. You'll be able to view air and bathing water quality for the majority of Europe as well as provide your own feedback.

Eye on Earth represents a partnership between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency. It includes information on the water quality for more than 22,000 bathing sites throughout Europe. It also includes information on air quality for more than 1,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout Europe.

Over five years, the site will grow to include information on many other environmental topics and turn into a global observatory for environmental change. It will broaden the thematic spectrum of environmental information by integrating prominent environmental challenges of our times, such as ground level ozone and other forms of air pollution, oil sills, biodiversity, and coastal erosion.

Join the fun!

WildObs (from "wildlife observations") participants capture memorable wildlife encounters and put them to work. Record your encounters for your own studies, or enjoyment. Use these records to develop you own wildlife calendar for the year. Maintain and grow your life-list, learn about new species and connect with nature.

Join the WildObs community via your Android or iPhone and use technology to help you connect with nature.

As a wildlife community, WilObs participants help each other find the nature (for a photograph or close encounter) and we learn about the species in our neighborhoods. WildObs is Collaborative wildlife enjoyment. It can help connect each other to wildlife.

Additionally, WildObs is a proud partner of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Watch, and works with a number of other scientific studies to extract citizen science from recorded encounters.

The WildLab engages citizen scientists in bird and other wildlife identification, using mobile phones as tools of scientific discovery. Along with associated curricula and educational activities found on its website, the WildLab is a powerful new way to see the environment.

The WildLab Bird iPhone app includes photographs, audio, and range maps for more than 200 common bird species. The app helps users make correct identifications by leading them through a process of elimination. The application saves each sighting with location and other data, and sightings are logged in the user’s online WildLab account. Files based on a user's sightings can be easily loaded into Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird database. (See http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/236/ for more on the eBird project.)

In a pilot program developed with funding from the MacArthur Foundation, more than 500 New York City 5th- through 12th-grade students used iPhones to log thousands of bird sightings from nearby parks and green spaces. Participants in the project increased their knowledge as well as their interest in science careers. All educators involved in the project said they would participate again if it was offered in the future.

The WildLab has also piloted a program with the Cornell Cooperative Extension for horseshoe crab monitoring; this app will be available soon in the app store. Through collaborations with science education institutions around the country, the WildLab continues to develop new apps and will run its in-school bird program this fall.

World Birds is a volunteer network that collects and makes available bird observations from around the world.

Developed as a global "family" of databases, each country has its own system linked to the map portal at http://www.worldbirds.org. This portal allows you to choose a country and submit your bird observations, thus making a valuable contribution to bird conservation on a local, national, and international scale.

Broadly accessible and with a strong community structure, this global initiative will establish a vast source of bird and environmental information generated by general birdwatchers and professionals alike.

Over time, more countries will be brought online as BirdLife partners implement new systems, leading to better coverage. Some of these databases will be developed independently, but many will be based on a core system, developed with the intention of bringing online as many countries as possible quickly and with minimal expense.

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us "…search out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues it's analysis when you are finished with your work.

Noah is a mobile phone app that allows nature lovers to document local wildlife and add their observations to a growing database for use by ongoing citizen-science projects.

Using the Noah mobile application, users take a photograph of an interesting organism, select the appropriate category, add descriptive tags, and click submit. The application captures the location details along with the submitted information and stores all of it in the species database for use by efforts such as Project Squirrel (http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/38/) and the Lost Ladybug Project (http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/50/).

In addition, users can see what kinds of organisms are nearby by searching through a list or exploring a map of the most recent spottings in their area, all on a mobile phone.

Noah is all about discovering and documenting local wildlife. We work with research groups and organizations to help gather important data and we want you to help by logging recent spottings on your mobile phone. Missions can range from photographing specific frogs or flowers to tracking migrating birds or invasive species or logging the effects of the oil spill.

(For more on cool apps for citizen scientists, see this post on the Sci4Cits blog http://www.scienceforcitizens.net/blog/2010/03/phone-apps-for-citizen-scientists-what-are-you-packing/ )

Imagine an expedition with a field staff of 10,000. How about 100,000? It's possible. Supported by National Geographic Digital Media, "Field Expedition: Mongolia — Valley of the Khans Project" is an innovative, noninvasive archaeological survey of Mongolia’s sacred lands that allows web users around the world to actively participate in an ongoing, real-time scientific exploration. Valley of the Khans is the ultimate citizen science project.

Because of the extensive size of the region of Mongolia being explored, detailed analysis of the terrain is beyond the capability that any single individual can handle. By providing real-time data, satellite imagery, maps and other information from the field directly to web users at home, the Valley of the Khans Project harnesses the analytic power of the collective public to crowdsource the identification of on-the-ground anomalies — anomalies that could indicate sites of cultural heritage. Once candidate locations are pinpointed they will be ground-truthed in real time by the expedition team concurrently working in the field.

Field Expedition: Mongolia also serves a greater technology purpose as well. In addition to guiding potential discoveries and supplementing the limitations of computer-based computational search alone, the data generated by sourcing a massive human demographic could be used to develop human computation concepts that will train computer-vision algorithms and facilitate active machine learning. This is especially relevant in the case of visual analytics where human intuition remains beyond the scope of existing computer object recognition algorithms.

Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project that aims to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to the year 2300 and to test the accuracy of climate models. To do this, the project needs people around the world to volunteer time on their computers - time when their computers are on but not being used at full capacity.

The project needs you to run a climate model program on your computer. The model will run automatically in the background whenever you switch your computer on, and it should not affect any other tasks for which you use your computer. As the model runs, you can watch the weather patterns evolve on your unique version of the world. The results are sent back to project coordinators via the Internet, and you will be able to see a summary of your results on the website. Climateprediction.net uses the same underlying software, BOINC, as many other distributed computing projects and, if you like, you can participate in more than one project at a time. (You can find out more about BOINC at http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/54/)

Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs, and much else. Current research suggests that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; Climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

Collect Gulf Oil Spill data using your iPhone. MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory) is an app that turns you and your iPhone into a "citizen scientist" helping wildlife experts find and rescue oiled birds, sea turtles, and dolphins.

The MoGO app allows you to take and submit photos of oiled, injured, and dead marine and coastal wildlife; tar balls on beaches; oil slicks on water; and oiled coastal habitats.

Massachusetts Audubon's American Kestrel Monitoring Project needs citizen scientists to record kestral sightings and breeding data in Massachusetts.

There are two ways to get involved:

1. Reporting: Seen a kestrel? You can report it online using the project's map tool. American Kestrels in Massachusetts breed between roughly May 10 to July 20. Simply record when and where you saw the bird, along with a brief note as to what it was doing. This information will help us choose good sites for new nest boxes!

2. Monitoring: If you've got a lot of time and enthusiasm, the project might be able to use your help as a volunteer Kestrel Box Monitor. Monitors will be assigned to check boxes frequently during the breeding season and to record important breeding data for use in evaluating the effectiveness of the program.

The American Kestrel is facing some serious challenges. Massachusetts Audubon would like to be prepared to meet those challenges for years to come, but they can't do it without your help!

Massachusetts Vernal Pool Salamander Migrations Study needs the public to document, through an online mapping interface, large migrations across roads of amphibians that breed in the state's vernal pools.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect rare wildlife in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Statewide Roadkill Database needs the public to document any roadkill observations in the state through an online mapping interface.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect wildlife in Massachusetts.

This project allows the public to document turtle roadkill observations in Massachusetts through an online mapping interface.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect turtles and other wildlife in Massachusetts.

The Camas Citizen Science Monitoring Program seeks to engage high school volunteers in the long-term scientific monitoring of camas lily populations in the Weippe Prairie site of Nez Perce National Historical Park. Students are trained in the classroom and then spend time in the field using data collection techniques specifically designed for this program. Results of the monitoring effort are available to National Park Service managers so that they can make better management decisions based on sound, scientific information.

Camas is an important cultural and natural resource. For the last 7,000 years, camas has been an important part of the Nez Perce history, life and culture, as well as those of many other tribes of the Pacific Northwest. In addition, camas is one of a suite of wetland species associated with seasonal wet prairie ecosystems. However, as a result of recent agricultural conversion, irrigation, flood control, and other land use practices, remaining wet prairies in this region have been drastically reduced. Projected climate change will also impact these wet prairie ecosystems and monitoring camas populations will provide the National Park Service an opportunity to track climate change impacts on park natural resources.

Monitoring of camas and invasive weeds is a unique opportunity to integrate natural resource monitoring with the cultural history of the Nez Perce people. Citizen scientists will use carefully designed scientific procedures and modern technology to collect data, such as the number of camas plants and flowering plants and the presence of invasive species. Components of the program are tied to state science standards, and high school students will work alongside ecologists, statisticians, natural resource managers, and interpretive rangers.

Three local high schools are currently participating each year. This is a unique learning opportunity that students are sure to remember.

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.

A related project in the Puget Sound area is the Salish Sea Hydrophone Network, http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/286/

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.

The Coral Reef Monitoring Data Portal is a new tool designed to support, enhance, and widen the scope of existing monitoring efforts in Hawaii. The data portal was developed and is managed by the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL). It was created in partnership with and in support of community-based monitoring programs coordinated by the State of Hawaii DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources, the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, Aquanimity Now, the Digital Bus, Project S.E.A.-Link, and other local organizations and agencies, through funding obtained from the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to CORAL’s Hawaii Field Manager Liz Foote, “We wanted to develop a 'one-stop-shop' for community based coral reef 
monitoring in Hawaii. This site was developed in support of current efforts such 
as the University of Hawaii Botany Department and Division of Aquatic Resources' herbivore grazing protocols, and the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National 
Marine Sanctuary's water quality monitoring program. This online data entry and 
reporting system will greatly expand the scope and impact of these monitoring 
efforts, and the associated resources provided on the site will empower and equip 
many more community members to get involved.”

Seward Park is using Twitter and citizen scientists to monitor coyote populations in Seattle, Washington, and surrounding areas.

Volunteer contributors can tweet or e-mail coyote sightings, and project organizers will include these sightings in the official Coyote Map (viewable at http://sewardscience.webs.com/coyotetracking.htm). This data will give researchers a better picture of where the coyotes are located, how often people see them, and maybe even what they're doing.

Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, needs citizen volunteers to monitor the health of hemlock trees.

Some of the hemlocks in Seward Park have annosus root disease, and park officials are worried about them. Researchers are establishing a long-term monitoring plan for 20-30 hemlocks in the park. This will allow them to watch for the progression of the disease on the infected trees and keep an eye out for spreading problems.

Fortunately, this project will only take a few hours every few months, so participating is easy!

Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, needs citizen volunteers to help survey insect-eating bats and analyze the resulting data and images. This will help researchers determine which bats make Seward Park their home.

Seward Park has the potential to be the home of 13 species of insect-eating bats. Park researchers and volunteers use acoustic monitoring devices and sonobat software to translate the very high frequency bat calls into an image that allows one to differentiate between the species.

From May through October, Seward Park researchers and volunteers take acoustic monitoring equipment out into the park and see which bats are chirping through the forest and along the lake.

Seward Park needs volunteers to monitor the plankton of Lake Washington in King County, Washington, over time to assess the health of the lake.

The research is based on the premise that plankton exhibit the effects of environmental change better than chemical or other physical data. Also, long-term monitoring of changes in species composition have signaled the beginning of a decline in European lakes and in Lake Washington in the past.

Volunteers take water samples from a few sites around the lake and count the different types of plankton under the microscope in a Seward Park laboratory. The project needs contributions in a variety of areas, including collecting, counting, and recording plankton.

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.

BeakGeek allows citizen scientists to share information about birds and bird sightings using freely available and simple social networking tools such as Twitter. BeakGeek adds value to the data created with these tools by providing map based visualizations and monitoring for terms such as "Rare Bird Alert".

Tracking Climate in Your Backyard seeks to engage youth in real science through the collection, recording, and understanding of precipitation data in the forms of rain, hail, and snow.

The purpose of this project is to encourage youth, specifically ages 8-12, to better understand the scientific process by engaging them in the collection of meaningful meteorological data in their community. In this way, youth develop an understanding of scientific methods and standardization, and by recording and sharing their data through a citizen science project, they recognize the importance of accurate data collection. The citizen science portion of the project, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (see http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/25/ ), collects precipitation data for scientific analysis and for issuance of severe storm warnings and flash flooding events. We believe that when youth know they are contributing data to a real, scientific cause, their engagement levels rise.

This National Science Foundation-funded project is a collaboration between the Paleontological Research Institution and Museum of the Earth, which have experience in professional development and informal education, New York State 4-H, which provides an excellent outreach base and fosters hands-on, experiential learning for youth, and the <a href="http://scienceforcitizens.net/project/25/">Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network</a>, which runs a citizen science project to record precipitation measurements in an online database.

South American Wildlands and Biodiversity needs volunteers to help identify, describe, and protect wildland complexes and roadless areas in South America.

Volunteers will use Google Earth to identify and map existing roads in areas of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Volunteers are needed who have access to Google Earth and are comfortable working on computers.

In addition, field volunteers are needed in South America to visit these areas on the ground and confirm the accuracy of the maps. Some of the more specialized tasks that field volunteers will perform include the use of global positioning system (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) equipment, as well as recording photographs and notes about the areas visited.

The wildlands of South America present one of the most important reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet. Mapping South American Wildlands is an ambitious project of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, with Latin American conservation partners, to map all the wildlands in South America, to evaluate their contribution to global biodiversity, and to share and disseminate this information.

This project will first focus on mapping and analyzing the roadless/undeveloped areas in the southern cone countries (Chile and Argentina) using a procedure that the Pacific Biodiversity Institute developed to map the wildlands of the United States in 2001.

The Western Gray Squirrel Project needs volunteers to assist with surveys of this species' population in the Methow Watershed in Washington State.

The western gray squirrel is listed as threatened in Washington State, and the Methow Valley area is home of one of the last three populations remaining in the state.

The main goal for this project is to conduct distribution surveys and relative abundance estimates that will augment work being conducted by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. This effort will further scientific knowledge about gray squirrel distributions throughout the Methow Valley.

Another goal is to conduct outreach to private landowners about western gray squirrel habitat and to educate the local community about the status of, threats to, and conservation needs of the squirrel.

There is potential for this project to lead to further work on western gray squirrels and other aspects of conservation science.

The Quake-Catcher Network provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes.

The Quake-Catcher Network links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the world’s largest and densest earthquake monitoring system. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others.

The Quake-Catcher Network also provides a natural way to engage students and the public in earthquake detection and research. This project places USB-connectable sensors in K-12 classrooms as an educational tool for teaching science and a scientific tool for studying and monitoring earthquakes. Through a variety of interactive experiments students can learn about earthquakes and the hazards that earthquakes pose.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. Let's get to work!

The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative effort to map every tree in the city of San Francisco. As a citizen forester, you can get involved by searching for trees, verifying records, and by adding the trees in your neighborhood!

Along the way, researchers will use this data to calculate the environmental benefits that the trees are providing -- how many gallons of storm water they are helping to filter, how many pounds of air pollutants they are capturing, how many kilowatt-hours of energy they are conserving, and how many tons of carbon dioxide they are removing from the atmosphere. The information we gather will help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings. Climatologists can use it to better understand the effects of urban forests on climates, and students and citizen scientists can use it to learn about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem.

The goal of Urban Forest Map is to provide a one-stop repository for tree data, welcoming information from any agency or group and enabling and celebrating citizen participation. Together, we'll work toward building a complete, dynamic picture of the urban forest.

Vital Signs (www.vitalsignsme.org) brings scientists and novices together to investigate species - particularly invasive species - in Maine.

People can participate in many ways (see http://www.vitalsignsme.org/ways-participate ): going outside to look for and document invasive and native species with digital images, location and habitat observations; then entering their observations into our online application; and commenting on shared observations from the comfort of their own homes.

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! You can learn about our first named particle, Orion, here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550924.stm

How much snow is on the ground where you are? Cryosphere researchers at the University of Waterloo want to know!

The Snowtweets Project provides a way for people interested in snow measurements to quickly broadcast their own snow depth measurements to the web. These data are then picked up by our database and mapped in near real time. We are especially interested in using web-based digital technologies to map snow data; currently, the project uses the micro-blogging site Twitter as its data broadcasting scheme.

To view the snow depth measurements (or Tweets), we have developed a data visualization tool called Snowbird that lets you explore the reported snow depths around the globe (see http://bit.ly/a73joY). The viewer shows where the reports are located and how much snow there is at each reported site.

The Snowtweets Project is in early stages of development and we plan to update and improve it as we go along. We rely on user participation to measure snow depth (including zero snow depth) and then send the measurements in.

You can help ChargeCar make electric vehicles more practical and affordable by sharing GPS data from your regular car trips. Contributing your commute data to ChargeCar helps us better understand the driving habits and needs of everyday commutes. You do not need an electric car to contribute to our project. On our website you calculate the cost of commuting with an electric car using your actual commute data, compare the efficiency of gasoline and electric cars for your trips, browse commutes across the country or work on a smart controller for our programming contest.

Use your mobile phone to help us locate invasive plants!

Invasive weeds are a significant threat to native plants and animals. Although most non-natives are not considered "invasive", those that crowd out food sources for wild animals, create erosion, or act as a significant fire hazard can be considered a threat and need to be identified and located for removal. You can help!

Then, using your Android mobile phone, help us locate invasive plants in an expanding number of locations across the US, or you can create your own list of plants that you want help in locating.

Our iPhone app currently works only in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area but is being updated soon.

The plants you identify will be placed on public map and alert park rangers of the spread of these habitat-destroying plants.

You can also participate using any mobile phone with text or picture messaging, email, or our web forms and a digital camera.

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/

The North American Bird Phenology Program is helping scientists understand the effect that global climate change has on bird populations across North America. Phenology is the scientific study of the relationship between natural phenomena (flowering, breeding, migration) and climatic or seasonal changes.

Migration cards are currently being scanned and becoming available on the program's website. You can become one of the many volunteers from around the country to sign into our site and convert these files into our database. This will allow the migration records to become accessible for analysis.

The program houses a unique and largely forgotten collection of six million Migration Observer Cards that illuminate migration patterns and population status of birds in North America. These handwritten cards were created by a network of citizen scientists who observed and recorded migration dates. This project began in 1881 and involved as many as 3000 participants a year.

Today, those records are being processed and placed into a modern database for analysis. This information will be used, along with recently collected arrival times of migrant birds, in conjunction with historical weather data to show how migration is affected by climate change. The information from this analysis will provide critical information on bird distribution, migration timing and migration pathways and how they are changing. There is no other program that has the depth of information that can help us understand the effect that global climate change has on bird populations across North America.

This is a very exciting and timely program which welcomes participants from all backgrounds and ages who would like to get involved.

Volunteers-In-Parks participants work side-by-side with National Park Service employees to preserve the United States' natural and cultural legacy and to help visitors discover the resources, meanings, and values found in its national parks. Anyone can be a "VIP": individuals, couples, families, students, and organized groups from all over the United States and the world. Become a VIP and put yourself at the heart of the park experience!

Volunteers-In-Parks participants play an ever-increasing role in national parks through a variety of jobs, including answering visitor questions at an information desk, presenting living history demonstrations in period costumes, building fences, painting buildings, making cabinets, giving guided nature walks and evening campfire programs, assisting with preservation of museum artifacts, maintaining trails, building boardwalks, designing computer programs or park websites, and serving on a bike, horseback, or beach patrol.

National Park Service internships provide learning opportunities through activities such as wilderness re-vegetation, assistance with preservation and restoration projects, water quality monitoring, surveying, educational cave tours, or assisting resource management staff. Internships offer an interesting and educational experience in some of the most beautiful areas of the country.

This is your chance to get actively involved in the stewardship of the United States' national and natural treasures.

Geoscientists-in-the-Parks partners geoscience students and experts with volunteers to conduct scientific research that helps the National Park Service better understand and manage its natural resources. Participants may assist with research, synthesis of scientific literature, geologic mapping, geographic information system analysis, site evaluations, resource inventorying and monitoring, impact mitigation, developing brochures and informative media presentations, and educating park staff as well as park visitors.

Volunteers selected for the program have a unique opportunity to contribute to a variety of important research, resource management, interpretation and education projects. Parks benefit from a participant’s knowledge and skills in geological or physical sciences, while each participant gains valuable experience by working with the National Park Service. Volunteers with all levels of experience are encouraged to apply.

The Citizens and Remote Sensing Observational Network is a central network of citizen scientists who share and communicate data. Environmental groups, science-focused institutions, and any individuals who are interested in environmental observations can participate.

Participants make important observations of their local environment based on their personal interest. In many cases, these observations may be helpful in improving a participant's community and quality of life. The network also gives citizen scientists a place to share and discuss their observations and ideas. Participants may also attend monthly meetings to share ideas, hear speakers, and network with other citizen scientists and professionals.

Open Street Map is a free, interactive map that allows anyone to view, edit, and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. The project was started because many maps available online have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.

Contributors to Open Street Map take handheld global positioning system (GPS) devices with them on journeys or go out specially to record GPS tracks. They record street names, village names, and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders. Back at the computer, contributors upload those GPS logs showing where they traveled and trace out the roads on Open Street Map's collaborative database. Using their notes, contributors add the street names, connections between roads, and other information such as the type of road or path. That data is then processed to produce detailed street-level maps, which can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.

Related Material:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2233301645
http://twitter.com/OpenStreetMap

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.

Project Implicit is an opportunity for citizens to assist psychological research on thoughts and feelings that exist either outside of conscious awareness or outside of conscious control. Participants assess their conscious and unconscious preferences for more than 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. Participants report attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics and provide general information about themselves.

The primary goals of Project Implicit are to provide a safe, secure, and well-designed virtual environment to investigate psychological issues and, at the same time, provide visitors and participants with an experience that is both educational and engaging.

The US Geological Survey's Twitter Earthquake Detection Program gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from Twitter and applies place, time, and keyword filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking. This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from citizens at the hazard’s location. The potential for earthquake detection in regions that are populated but where seismic instruments are sparse is also being investigated.

Data from the project will support other earthquake projects that rapidly detect and report earthquake locations and magnitudes in the United States and globally. The Program will also determine the best way to broadcast scientifically confirmed earthquake alerts via Twitter.

Related Material:
http://twitter.com/USGSted
http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/details.asp?ep=113

NASA needs your help to monitor the rates and sizes of large meteoroids striking the moon's dark side. By monitoring the moon for impacts, NASA can define the meteoroid environment and identify the risks that meteors pose to future lunar exploration. This data will help engineers design lunar spacecraft, habitats, vehicles, and extra-vehicular activity suits to protect human explorers from the stresses of the lunar environment.

CONE-Welder is an online game in which participants use a robotic web camera to help Smithsonian Institution researchers document the presence of subtropical birds that may be affected by global warming.

CONE-Welder is part of a larger project, Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments, which provides an opportunity for groups of citizens, via the internet, to remotely observe, record, and index detailed animal activity. The goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of automated and collaborative systems and to observe and record detailed natural behavior in remote settings.

EpiCollect is a mobile phone application that allows professional and citizen scientists to gather, submit, and access research data through a central web database. The software is powered by Google Maps and Android, Google's open-source operating system.

EpiCollect was designed for epidemiological and ecological studies but has potential for a number of other fields, including economics, public health, and resource allocation. Individual users can input data (variables, photos, location, etc.) into EpiCollect from their mobile phone, which is synchronized to a central database. An accompanying web application, located at www.spatialepidemiology.net, provides a common location for mapping, visualization, and analysis of the data by everyone involved in the study.

Related Material: http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/11/droid_does_citizen_science/

Botanicalls provides an opportunity for plants that might otherwise be neglected to request assistance. When a plant needs water, a moisture-sensing system alerts its caretaker via call, text message, or Twitter.

Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.

Related Material: http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2008/10/your_plant_is_twittering_im_thirsty/

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.

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.

Related Material: Incredible Crayon Physics (Science Cheerleader blog): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/06/incredible_crayon_physics/

CureTogether is a worldwide health research project that brings patients and researchers together to find cures for some of the most painful, prevalent, and chronic conditions. Users anonymously track their own health care data, including medication schedules, symptoms, and treatment plans, and provide it other participants around the world.

By making aggregate health data available for analysis, CureTogether provides a conduit for citizens to work together to better understand their bodies, make more informed treatment decisions, and influence scientific research.

Related Material: Need Answers About Swine Flu or Allergies? CureTogether! (Science Cheerleader):
http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/05/need_answers_about_swine_flu_or_allergies_curetogether/

NASA's Radio JOVE project enables students and amateur scientists to observe natural radio emissions from Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy. Participants learn about radio astronomy first-hand by building their own radio telescope from an inexpensive kit and/or using remote radio telescopes through the Internet. They also collaborate with each other through interactions and sharing of data on the network.

The Radio JOVE project began in 1998. Since then, more than 1,600 teams of students and interested individuals have purchased non-profit radio telescope kits and are learning radio astronomy by building and operating a radio telescope. This self-supporting, non-profit program continues to thrive and inspire new groups of students as well as individuals.

Galaxy Zoo needs your help to classify galaxies according to their shapes—a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer. Our files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them.

More than 200,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies.

Read ‘The Story So Far’ (http://www.galaxyzoo.org/story) to find out what Galaxy Zoo has achieved to date.

Thanks for your help, and happy classifying.

Related material:
Help Galaxy Zoo Sort Through The Celestial Menagerie (Science Cheerleader): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2008/10/help_galaxy_zoo_sort_through_the_celestial_menagerie/

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.

Related Material:
A New Way for Gamers to be Scientists in Their Spare Time (Science Cheerleader): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/04/a_new_way_for_gamers_to_be_scientists_in_their_spare_time/