Word: oneness
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Citizen science - "the involvement of nonprofessionals in the scientific process," according to University of Oxford astronomer 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...
...were photographed between 2000 and 2008 by a telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Because every feature of each galaxy had to be categorized by at least 20 people - having multiple classifications of the same object is important because it helps scientists assess how reliable each one is - astronomers estimated it would take three to five years to categorize all million galaxies...
...took three weeks. In the first year, 50 million classifications were made by 150,000 people. Galaxy Zoo became the world's largest database of galaxy shapes. There are now German- and Polish-language versions, and a Chinese one is scheduled to launch sometime in April. (See pictures of Earth from space...
...space and time, and contributing a bit of knowledge about it can be humbling and satisfying. "Every galaxy has a story to tell. They are beautiful, mysterious, and show how amazing our universe is," says Aida Berges, a homemaker in Puerto Rico who has classified 150,000 galaxies - at one point putting in 16-hour days. "It was love at first sight when I started in Galaxy Zoo ... It is a magical place, and it feels like coming home at last." (See pictures of five nations' space programs...
...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 in the wild. (It's one of the few nonprimate species to create and even modify tools...