Word: helpness
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...Chris Lintott, one of Galaxy Zoo's founders - is not a new concept. Distributed-computing projects like SETI@home, which hunts for radio signals that might indicate intelligent life in the universe, and ClimatePrediction.net, which tests the accuracy of global climate models, have long tapped volunteers' home computers to help process data. The difference between these projects and Galaxy Zoo - and its inspiration, Stardust@home, which asks volunteers to search electron-microscope images for interstellar dust particles collected in space - is that the latter two interface with not the volunteer's PC but with his or her mind...
Among the most ambitious and successful online "citizen science" projects to date, Galaxy Zoo asks its participants to help classify galaxies by studying images of them online and answering a standard set of questions about their features. For instance: Is the galaxy smooth or bulging? Is it elliptical or spiral? If it's spiral, how many arms does it have, and are they tightly wound or thrown open wide? (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...Hubble Space Telescope. The project's findings have led to 10 scientific articles, which appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and six more are on the way. And a few "zooites," as the volunteers refer to themselves, hope to publish their own citizen-science research projects someday, with help from professional astronomers...
Researchers from other disciplines have begun approaching the Galaxy Zoo team for help sorting their own masses of information. With Galaxy Zoo's assistance, the Royal Observatory Greenwich just launched Solar Stormwatch, which asks volunteers to track solar explosions captured on video by NASA's STEREO spacecraft. The idea is eventually to be able to predict these flare-ups, which interfere with satellites and endanger astronauts. Another project will task volunteers with translating the famous Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a cache of 50,000 Ptolemaic-era manuscript fragments from Egypt. Yet another will analyze footage of the New Caledonian crow...
Though many of the details concerning the current experiments going on in the Liu laboratory are classified information, Guan continues to help the team investigate properties of the GFP proteins and expand upon recent discoveries...