Aggregated News
Science is not just for scientists these days. Going on a scuba-diving holiday this summer? Share the temperature data from your dive computer with researchers eager to plug holes in sparse records for inshore areas. Nervous about possible pollution from a nearby fracking project? Ease your concerns by helping to collect and analyse air samples as part of a monitoring project. Stuck at home as the rain pours down? Log on to the Internet and spend a couple of hours folding proteins and RNA to help university scientists work out how biology does it.
Citizen science has come a long way from the first distributed-computing projects that hoovered up spare processing power on home computers to perform calculations or search for alien signals. And it has progressed further still since the earliest public surveys of wildlife: it was way back in 1900 that the Audubon Society persuaded Americans to exchange their Christmas tradition of shooting birds for a more productive effort to count them instead.
Some professional scientists are sniffy about the role of amateurs, but as an...