Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Zooniverse

  
Zooniverse is a website that's home to citizen science projects. You can join and participate in various crowd-sourced science projects that include:

  • Helping to assemble old Egyptian scrolls
  • Recovering worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I
  • Locating ice chunks beyond Pluto's orbit for a NASA probe
  • Searching for extra-solar planets
  • Classify galaxies in Hubble photographs
  • Spot solar explosions and track their path towards Earth
  • Catalog the moon's surface

There's a few more there that I haven't bothered listing. The site is an amateur science geek's paradise.

I fiddled around with the Ancient Lives Project a little. This project is meant to assist in assembling Egyptian (written in Greek) scroll fragments for translation. You get a fragment which you can rotate until you think it is right-side-up. Then you mark the center of each letter and pick the appropriate Greek letter from a palette. You then mark the margins, this is to aide in selecting which piece goes with which. Eventually you land on a screen where you can try to fit fragments together.

Like I said -- an amateur science geek's paradise. So, if you like that kind of stuff be sure to head over there and check out their projects.
 

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