All articles tagged with #citizen science
Video games and virtual reality are being repurposed from entertainment to medical tools: they're helping calm children during imaging and minor procedures—reducing or avoiding general anesthesia in some cases—and enabling public participation in scientific research through games that guide tasks like DNA sequencing, signaling a broader future where gaming tech advances health care and science.
After a July fireball over New Zealand’s North Island, Fireballs Aotearoa and citizen scientists traced a possible strewn field and recovered four meteorite fragments totaling 75 g, including an 8 g piece found by Steve Wyn-Harris; a 39 g fragment was found the next day, followed by two more, all confirmed as meteorites and slated for naming and analysis, likely ordinary chondrites from an asteroid belt and possibly linked to NZ’s first meteorite near Masterton in 1863.
A 2023 Science study analyzing 51,351 naked-eye reports from Globe at Night finds artificial night-brightening is increasing about 9.6% per year, faster than satellite records showed, which could reduce the number of visible stars for a growing portion of the world’s population (roughly 6.5%/yr in Europe and 10.4%/yr in North America). The mismatch arises because satellites measure radiance differently from how the human eye perceives star visibility, especially with blue-rich LEDs and light scattered by the atmosphere. The overall message is that light pollution is advancing quickly and solutions like shielding and smarter lighting could help retain the night sky for future generations.
In a West Wales Wildwatch morning, volunteers and recorders identify a range of species—from a dark giant horsefly to marmalade hoverflies and a Rosa micrantha—before spotting a tortoise beetle larva whose prehensile anus forms a self-made fecal shield to deter predators, illustrating how dedicated citizen scientists uncover extraordinary wildlife in ordinary fields.
Space.com profile of the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast Initiative (DEB), a NASA-/NSF-supported network of volunteer solar observers guided by Southern Illinois University Carbondale that uses portable, affordable gear to record and livestream the sun’s corona during total solar eclipses. For the Aug. 12, 2026 eclipse, two DEB teams will observe from Leon and Valoria la Buena in Spain, with data streamed in real time to public streams and NASA coverage, and the project plans a larger 2027 campaign across North Africa to expand participation and data collection.
An amateur astronomer in Québec spotted a 15.5‑mile circular feature on Google Maps. A field visit confirmed it as a meteorite crater dating about 390 million years, thanks to impact melt-rock and shatter cones, with findings to be presented at the Meteoritical Society Meeting—highlighting the value of citizen science.
AI-generated and edited bird photos are flooding online forums, raising concerns that fake or altered images could contaminate citizen-science databases (like iNaturalist and Macaulay Library) and misreport species’ ranges. While outright hoaxes are rare, AI edits can introduce traits from other species—for example, a red-winged blackbird appearance in Brazil—prompting researchers to urge caution and stricter verification to preserve data quality.
Off Western Australia, a humpback was filmed performing a rare 'gape' display—jaw wide, fins sweeping—likely a social signal or calf-stretch rather than feeding. Macquarie University researchers, drawing on 66 crowd-sourced videos, suggest gaping is a distinct behavior revealed through citizen science, not a feeding move. As humpbacks begin their annual migration, experts urge observers to keep distance to protect whales amid increased coastal activity and risks like entanglements.
NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have essentially doubled the known population of brown dwarfs, adding more than 3,000 discoveries over the last decade from WISE/NEOWISE data via the Zooniverse platform. About 200,000 volunteers contributed, with 61 co-authors among the 75 authors, uncovering rare objects such as extreme T subdwarfs and possible aurorae, improving maps of the galaxy’s mass distribution while the search continues through billions more sources.
NASA invites the public to join citizen-science projects that aid human space exploration—sorting MMS data to study solar storms, growing space crops with Growing Beyond Earth, analyzing life-in-space data, and building space-weather stations with HamSCI—open to anyone with a love of science and no citizenship requirements.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid survey has released a massive data set (about 72 million galaxies, roughly 30 times larger than earlier) and invites the public to help identify gravitational lenses via the Space Warps citizen-science project. AI has pre-selected around 300,000 candidate images, but human inspection remains key to spotting the subtle arcs and rings. The goal is to discover more than 10,000 new lenses, with early results from just 0.04% of the data yielding 500 lenses, enabling scientists to measure total mass (including dark matter) and study cosmic expansion. No physics degree is required—just curiosity.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope is powering a new citizen-science project on Zooniverse called Space Warps, enlisting volunteers to identify strong gravitational lenses in Euclid’s high‑quality images. This work helps study dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic expansion, with around 300,000 AI‑preselected images guiding the search and the team expecting to uncover more than 10,000 new lens candidates from Euclid Data Release 1.
A bright fireball over western Germany near Koblenz exploded and showered space rocks; scientists and citizen scientists pieced together the meteorite's likely trajectory using hundreds of eyewitness reports and KIT seismic data, while German law generally lets you keep meteorites unless they’re of special value; NASA estimates around 44,000 kg of meteoritic material reaches Earth daily, mostly micrometeorites.
Citizen scientists in NASA's Backyard Worlds project identified CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 traveling at about 1 million miles per hour, fast enough to escape the Milky Way. Its nature is unclear, likely a brown dwarf or low-mass star, possibly ejected by a white-dwarf supernova or a close encounter in a globular cluster. The discovery, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters, underscores the power of crowdsourced science using NASA's WISE data.
Citizen scientists identify a Pavona clavus coral off Cairns spanning about 111 meters and covering roughly 3,973 square meters, potentially making it one of the reef’s largest colonies. Genetic testing is needed to confirm if it is a single organism or multiple close colonies, with size mapped via photogrammetry and implications for reef resilience.