Putting the ‘I’ in Science 1.6 Million Registered Users

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century, the US-based National Audubon Society has relied on an army of volunteers to count birds across North America each December. And since 1911, the American Association of Vari- able Star Observers The Crowd and in Cambridge, the Cosmos: Massachusetts, has Adventures in the Zooniverse enlisted a network CHRIS LINTOTT of predominantly Oxford University Press amateur astrono- (2019) mers to collect nearly 40 million observations of stars that have fluctuating bright- ness. That endeavour has provided valuable insights into stellar lifecycles and distances to galaxies. SETI@home, launched in 1999, meanwhile uses the idle time on millions of home computers to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. In recent years we’ve seen an explosion in new opportunities, in fields such as cetology, linguistics and space archaeology. The SciStarter website (https://scistarter.org), for example, currently aggregates thousands of citizen-science projects and events from around the world. One researcher who has been at the forefront of the phenomenon for more than a decade is Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, UK, and a presenter of The Sky at Night, the BBC’s monthly astronomy television ASTRONOMY show. In his new book, The Crowd and the Cosmos, Lintott tells the story of the most ambitious, successful citizen-scientist initiative so far: Zooniverse, which boasts Putting the ‘I’ in science 1.6 million registered users. Through its platform, people can, in effect, become Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science research assistants to scientists working on project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West. projects in a profusion of fields. What these have in common are large quantities of data and a need for human eyes, ears and brains itizen science is booming. Today, democratize the discipline, harnessing to help make sense of them. anyone with a computer or a smart- mutual enthusiasm and collective wisdom Zooniverse emerged from the success of phone can participate in research to gather and analyse data. Galaxy Zoo, Lintott’s first citizen-science Cin astronomy, oceanography, medicine, As a research tool, crowdsourcing is venture. In 2007, faced with the daunting task zoology and beyond. With such studies nothing new. Charles Darwin main- of classifying millions of galaxies imaged by no longer the exclusive realm of an elite tained a voluminous correspondence the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New few, communities of amateur and profes- with fellow naturalists and lay enthusi- Mexico, Lintott and colleagues solicited help sional scientists have joined together to asts in the Victorian era. For more than a through a brief slot on BBC Radio’s morning

Virtual Competition Ten Great Ideas About Chance Ariel Ezrachi & Maurice E. Stucke Harvard Persi Diaconis & Brian Skyrms Princeton Univ. Press (2019) Univ. Press (2019) From price-comparison algorithms to phone Philosopher Brian Skyrms and mathematician operating systems, technology has altered Persi Diaconis weave the foundations of competitive commerce. Lawyers Ariel Ezrachi probability with economics and history in this and Maurice E. Stucke question the democratic engrossing discourse. A must-read for anyone consequences of this dual-edged power. interested in the dissection of probability. Mary Craig

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current-affairs programme. The response was revealed by millions of photographs taken nightly from the Large Synoptic Survey beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Within a few with motion-sensitive cameras through- Telescope in northern Chile, triggering days, volunteers were classifying 70,000 gal- out Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. myriad follow-up observations. Other axies every hour on their own computers. The Space Warps project invites armchair fields face similar challenges coping with One of Lintott’s key messages is that citizen astronomers to search for rare but spectacu- an ever-faster flow of data. Genomic science is much more than free labour. Many lar gravitational lenses, created when gravity researchers are both blessed and burdened such projects exploit the human brain’s ability distorts images of faraway galaxies. These act by a deluge of data emanating from hugely to recognize patterns, or to spot unusual fea- like enormous funhouse mirrors to produce accelerated sequencing. And remote-sensing tures in data that even the most sophisticated optical illusions on the grandest scale. observations by a growing armada of satel- computer algorithms can miss. Collabora- Lintott is not the first to write about this lites, such as the joint European–Japanese tions between professional and amateur topic. Caren Cooper’s 2016 Citizen Science, EarthCARE mission scheduled for launch researchers also increase public understand- for example, was illuminating. However, it is in 2021, will map and measure our planet’s ing of science, and have produced a growing hard to imagine anyone more qualified than surface as never before over the next decade. list of publications in peer-reviewed jour- Lintott — a veteran of the citizen-science Although increasingly powerful computers nals. The first Galaxy Zoo paper, released in trenches — to give an insightful perspec- and artificial intelligence can help to analyse 2008, has been cited in more than 500 other the data tsunamis, they won’t make citizen astronomy papers (C. J. Lintott et al. Preprint scientists obsolete any time soon. at https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.4483; 2008). WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Scrutinizing Earth’s surface is one thing; Reef Life Survey, a citizen-science project having an impact on the future of the planet that engages recreational divers around the and its people is another. Can citizen science world to monitor biodiversity in coral reefs, VOLUNTEERS change the world? Maybe. From monitor- has produced nearly 60 peer-reviewed papers WERE CLASSIFYING ing flower production by plants as a gauge so far, including 5 in this journal. of climate change to analysing brain scans Citizen scientists have also made 70,000 GALAXIES in the quest to find the cause of Alzheimer’s serendipitous discoveries on their own. In disease, lay researchers are actively 2007, for example, Dutch school teacher EVERY HOUR improving lives globally. Just days after Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a mysteri- ON THEIR OWN Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas ous green blob in an image she was examining in late August, a new Zooniverse project was for Galaxy Zoo. This unusual object, which already helping rescue efforts as volunteers became known as Hanny’s Voorwerp (Dutch COMPUTERS. identified damage visible in satellite images. for ‘Hanny’s thingy’), is now thought to be a Moreover, as Lintott reminds us, this great giant cloud of gas illuminated by a powerful tive. And he does so both accessibly and public venture is helping to foster a more sci- blast from a supermassive black hole in the engagingly. There is a flavour of Bill Bryson’s entifically literate society, and empowering a neighbouring galaxy IC 2497. breezy erudition in A Short History of Nearly new generation of scientists. Not bad for a free Zooniverse, as Lintott shows, hugely Everything (2003), although the book does app that you can download to your phone. ■ expands the field of investigation. Penguin ramble in places. Overall, however, Lintott Watch, for example, invites volunteers deftly interweaves personal experience and Michael West is Deputy Director for Science to monitor the rise and fall of Antarctic more philosophical ruminations on public at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, penguin populations by counting birds participation in science. USA. He is also Secretary of the International photographed by a network of automated What of the future of citizen science? Astronomical Union’s commission on cameras. Snapshot Serengeti uses a similar Astronomy, once photon-starved, will soon Communicating Astronomy with the Public. approach to study animal ecosystems be awash in 15–30 terabytes of new data e-mail: [email protected]

CHEMISTRY From bomb to Moon Angela N. H. Creager is inspired by the life of the Nobel laureate who discovered deuterium.

fter witnessing the 1945 Trinity Nobel-prizewinning chemist distanced commitment to research integrity. Urey grew atomic-bomb test, the theoretical himself from nuclear weapons development up a minister’s son in a poor Indiana farming physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer after the war. His search for science beyond family belonging to a plain-living Protestant Arecalled Hindu scripture: “Now I am become defence work prompted a shift into study- sect, the Church of the Brethren. Progress- Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Although ing the origins of life and lunar geology. ing through increasingly diverse educational this is often interpreted as admitting moral Now, the absorbing biography The Life and environments, culminating in a PhD at the culpability on the part of the Manhattan Science of Harold C. Urey by science histo- University of California, Berkeley, Urey Project’s scientific director, Oppenheimer rian Matthew Shindell uses the researcher’s became self-conscious about the zealousness remained a central player in the nuclear- life to show how a conscientious chemist of his family’s faith. He also found the path to weapons establishment until he lost his navigated the cold war. a cosmopolitan, middle-class life. security clearance in the mid-1950s. Shindell argues that Urey’s pious upbring- In the 1920s, Urey was among a small Harold Urey also worked for the ing underpinned his convictions about the group of chemists who collaborated closely Manhattan Project. But by contrast, the dangers of a nuclear arms race, and his with physicists. Working at Niels Bohr’s