Zooniverse: Help compile important — an fascinating research as a citizen scientist

Interested in helping archivists uncover the secrets of enormous scientific collections? Want to measure wild giraffes or search for elusive gravitational waves?

You don’t need a PhD or a lab coat to do so.

Zooniverse, a citizen-science platform, uses crowd power to contribute to science. The site recruits individuals to aid projects in fields such as physics, astronomy, zoology and the social sciences. It’s crowdsourcing on a huge scale. Individuals can scour through large data sets, collect and classify data and make scientific contributions that computers cannot. They can also connect with researchers in discussion forums, where their opinions and observations fuel further research.

Sounded interesting so I tried it out for myself. Thought I'd share it here with all of you at ATS.

One popular project is  Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers classify telescope images of far-off galaxies. Bash the Bug, another volunteer favorite, is helping researchers figure out which antibiotics can treat different strains of tuberculosis in an attempt to fight new drug-resistant strains.

Another project, the "Cell Slider", looked much closer to home, and proved how crowdsourcing might be able to help in the fight against cancer. Volunteers classified more than 180,000 microscopic images of human cells — and proved as accurate as trained pathologists at identifying cancerous cells and tumors.

All that work has resulted in plenty ofpublished research. .

It’s easy to get started: Just pick a project, complete a quick training and begin contributing.

Zooniverse Website

Washington Post