Astronomy is entering a new regime of “big data.” The volumes of information being collected are staggering, and future projects promise data sets of ever-increasing size. The total data volume of the ...

We sometimes look back fondly on the old days where you could–it seems–pretty easily invent or discover something new. It probably didn’t seem so easy then, but there was a time when working out how ...

As school winds down and we head into summer, it’s a great chance to dip a toe into scientific research that you can do with just an internet connection and a curious mind. The Zooniverse program at ...

In 2007, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium teamed up with the University of Oxford in England to create “Zooniverse”, an outreach program joining citizen scientists with professional researchers working in ...

Recently, Adam Stevens looked at where crowdsourcing ends and citizen science begins and raised his doubt that the projects in the Zooniverse qualify as citizen science. According to Stevens, ...

To the world’s lengthening list of possible leisure-time activities, you can add this rather surprising one: Do hard-core, but not particularly hard, scientific research. Thanks to Zooniverse, a ...

A few years ago, astronomers found themselves burdened with a tricky problem. Having surveyed the night skies in a project known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, they were faced with the giant task of ...

Discovering new planets takes time and manpower — or, at least, a lot of the latter. Since July 2007, Zooniverse has provided a platform for citizen scientists (that’s any person with an interest in ...