Take it away, Dr. John! One of my favorite video games growing up was The Incredible Machine. This 2-D puzzle game required the player to organize a series of common household items into an absurdly complex contraption to perform a simple action (e.g., turn on a light). The playing field included both fixed and movable objects, all of which interacted through simulated physics of gravity, air pressure, heat, and contact. It was incredibly fun, and I was incredibly horrible at it. I have been looking for redemption ever since.

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Recently, my colleague Bioephemera introduced me to Crayon Physics, an innovative physics puzzle game that relies on nothing but your imagination, creativity, and ability to wield a miniature crayon. Watch the video above and check out the demo – you can get familiar with the basic maneuvers and even create your own levels. If you’re interested in a real challenge, Crayon Physics Deluxe is now available for a nominal fee.

I can’t promise that you’ll learn much about actual physics, nor can I promise that you will atone for past failings like me. What I can promise you is heaps of fun, over 70 different puzzles, and the opportunity to create and share your own levels over the Internet. I can also promise you a bizarre musical arrangement that mixes Gregorian chanting with that relaxing music you always hear during deep tissue massages. Thankfully, this imaginary world of oddball physics also includes volume control.

• Topics: physics, puzzles
• Location: at hom
• Duration: any
• Cost: low cost
• Gear: computer, internet
• Level of Difficulty: easy

…how about classifying a few while you’re gazing?  SCOPE, or Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration, needs the help of citizen scientists to observe stars and compare their features to the sun. The gases on the outer visible surface of the star absorb the light emitted from the inside of the star, and these absorption spectra are collected by a prism placed in front of a telescope lens.  These absorption spectra can vary with temperature and the composition of the gases on the star’s outer surface.

Spectra of stars that are currently not classified are made available online by PARI volunteers for comparison to stars that have already been classified.  Interested participants can read their science information section to learn more about stars and their spectra.  There is a also a special tutorial section where new users can learn what a typical star’s spectra looks like and how it can be classified.

Many thanks to Christi Whitworth for bringing such a neat project to our attention.  (Remember readers, if you have any projects to suggest, use this link!)

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: astronomy, star gazing
• Location: at home, close to home
• Duration: any
• Cost: free
• Gear: computer, internetr
• Level of Difficulty: easy

Though our continued support for citizen scientist programs across the country is vital to the success of directed scientific research about specific topics, we also need make sure we remain broadly educated about the general scientific issues we face everyday. The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE), located in Philadelphia, is one of the first urban environmental education centers established in the United States, and has been dedicated to teaching the citizens of Philadelphia about issues facing their community for over forty years.  Their adult citizen science lecture series is still ongoing, with two lectures left this season.  The schedule for each of the seminars is the same:

• 6:30 p.m.  Reception & informal information session featuring refreshments and displays from visiting organizations.
• 7:00 p.m.  Program followed by a question and answer session with the speaker

On Thursday, May 21, three of the Philadelphia’s leading landscape architects will be conducting a discussion about how landscape architecture is at the forefront of the sustainability movement.  This program will include a guided tour of “Gimme Shelter: sustainable woodland shelters on a small scale”, at 6 pm.  (My roommate is a landscape architect at the Olin Studio here in Philadelphia, and I find her work to be extremely exciting!  While Olin is not one of the firms represented on this panel, I can personally attest that the works produced by landscape architects are not just works of art — they also preserve the natural environment all cities need to flourish.) On Thursday, June 4, representatives of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, PhillyCarShare, SEPTA, and other regional transportation organizations present realistic alternatives to owning and driving automobiles in and around Philadelphia. I will be present at both of these lectures, and will be writing a follow-up article to fill you non-Philadelphians on what you missed.  If you would like to join me, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE) is located in the northwest corner of Philadelphia in the neighborhood of Roxborough.  Their address is: 8480 Hagy’s Mill Road, Philadelphia, PA 19128.

As the spread of influenza A virus H1N1 (otherwise known as the swine flu) continues around the world, it becomes even more important for researchers to have access to as much clinical data as possible so that they can develop treatments not just for this virus, but for many other common conditions affecting our population.  One way that clinical data can be available for researchers to analyze is through CureTogether, an open source health research plan.  (For more information on what it means to be an open source, click here.)

This webpage is not just helpful to the researchers that can log on and view the anonymous data compiled by the website, as users can also benefit just by updating their profile.  The CureTogether website allows you to track your health day-by-day by monitoring your medication schedule or health goals, and you can compare your symptoms and treatment plans to those of other users.  This has the potential to be a great networking system for those just diagnosed with an illness, especially those who are not ready to connect publicly through a face-to-face support group.

I know the idea of putting your health information on the internet can be scary, so I checked out this site personally before writing this post.  Signing up was very easy – I entered my e-mail address, a password, and a username that will be visible to other users of the database (which you can make as personal or as impersonal as you choose).  I then searched for the health conditions that affect me, and answered a series of yes or no questions about my symptoms and treatment for that disease.  I now have the options of monitoring my weight, sleep, and symptoms on a daily basis.  Additionally, CureTogether will provide updates to my personal webpage with treatments and symptoms as other people report them.  If I choose to, I can connect with the community further by blogging about dealing with my condition (I’m sure many people can relate to my terrible allergies, for example) or jump into an existing blog-based discussion with patients that share my condition.  The nice thing about CureTogether is that you can be as connected or as disconnected from the community as you want to be on the user level – the only thing that will be collected is the anonymous data that you input about your condition.  And what happens to all this data?  CureTogether posts data generated by the website community as it is used in research studies.  You can track this on their Research Findings blog.

NOTE:  This website, while very helpful, should not be used in lieu of seeing your regular medical doctor.  However, the things you learn while visiting CureTogether may help you and your doctor to develop your ongoing treatment plan.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: health, research database
• Location: at home or close to home
• Duration: a few minutes daily, if you want to track your progress
• Cost: free or low cost
• Gear: a computer with internet access
• Level of Difficulty: easy

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has dedicated itself to interpreting and conserving the diversity of nature’s bird population through research, education, and citizen science projects.  Though I encourage you all to check out their website for more information on all of the exciting research going on in the Cornell laboratories, today I would like to highlight one of the ways you can help as citizen scientists.

One of the major projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology involves NestCams, which record live images of birds courting, mating, laying eggs, and raising young.  These cameras record a variety of bird species, including Northern Cardinals, Osprey, Blue Jays, and American Robins (to name a few).  As a scientist myself, I can attest that sometimes the hardest thing about science is not collecting data, but analyzing it.  And as you can imagine, with images recording around the clock, these scientists at Cornell collect a lot of data to classify and analyze!  This is definitely one way that citizen scientists continue to be essential for the success of the NestCam project.  The Cornell scientists have created CamClickr, which is a completely online-based citizen science project to help them classify their tremendous archives of video and still images.  Users simply log on to the CamClickr site and then choose the species and phase of the nesting cycle they want to start classifying.  It’s that easy!  User tagging and coding for species and nesting cycles occurs in two phases.  In phase one, users drag and drop images into photo albums that are classified according to presence or absence of nests, adult birds, eggs, or baby birds.  Once 99 images have been classified, users can then move on to phase two, where all images that passed through Level 1 are classified according to pre-defined behaviors.

Top “CamClickrs” are rewarded for their efforts – one point is awarded for every successful classification, and those points can add up to prizes!

P.S.  The image above is from a coloring book – happy coloring, kids of all ages!

Statistics from previous years:  Since 1999, NestCams have documented 90 nesting attempts by 17 bird species across North America.  That is a lot of data!  Hundreds of thousands of images have since been classified by citizen scientists like you and me.  Today’s top CamClickr is user name Claire K, with over 188,000 images classified!  Can you beat her?

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: birds, ecology, nesting cycle
• Location: at home or close to home
• Duration: a few minutes, whenever you can veg in front of your computer
• Cost: free or low cost
• Gear: a computer with internet access
• Level of Difficulty: easy

Video games are everywhere these days!  And so, the next time you go to pick up your Wii controllers or log on to your favorite World of Warcraft server, take an hour or so to put your gaming skills to a more scientific use.  Scientists at the University of Washington are exploiting our societal love of video games to advance their research on protein folding by creating the game Foldit.

Though this program appears to be just a game based on logic, each “move” in the game is actually determining protein structure, one fold at a time. So why should you dedicate your hour of free time folding proteins instead of getting a new high score on Mario Kart?  Proteins are biology’s workforce: they drive all of the reactions that make biology work, and comprise all of the structural elements that hold biology together.  Proteins self-assemble into specific shapes, or folds, in order to carry out their designated function.  When proteins fold incorrectly, they can clump together into aggregates that promote diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and Mad Cow.  And so, by understanding the folding process for particular proteins linked to these diseases, scientists can also begin to predict where folding mistakes may occur and how to avoid them. To get started, download the free Foldit program and take the 20 minute tutorial on the rules of the game.  There are also beginner puzzles you can try to familiarize yourself with how the program works.  From there, it’s happy folding! A special thank you to JT Lewis, for bringing the Foldit project to my attention. (Reporting on citizen science projects is much easier to do with the help of our readers — this means YOU!  Please report any projects you hear about using our form on the main webpage!)

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: Computers and technology
• Location: at home or close to home
• Duration: a few hours, or less
• Cost: free or low cost
• Gear: A computer with an internet connection (to download software)
• Level of Difficulty: Easy

Philadelphia will join 2,848 cities in 84 countries on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. for Earth Hour 2009.  The World Wildlife Fund, a global conservation group, is asking governments, businesses, and individuals around the world to demonstrate their commitment to finding solutions to global warming by turning off their lights for one hour.  Landmarks around the world from New York City’s Empire State Building to the Sphinx and Great Pyramids in Egypt will go dark to call attention to climate change.  Participating is as easy as citizen science projects get – just turn off your light switches for one hour! (If you’re thinking of switching to candles to save carbons, this report suggests otherwise.)

The goal of the World Wildlife Fund is to have one billion people worldwide vote for energy conservation by turning off their lights.  These votes will be presented to world leaders convening at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) held in Copenhagen in December 2009.

I plan to spend my vote eating a delicious dinner cooked by my fiance…by candlelight!  Families with kids could read a ghost story by flashlight or make shadow puppets!  Be creative, and feel free to post your Earth Hour activities in the comments section of this post.

Statistics from previous years: In 2007, more than two million homes and businesses participated in Sydney, Australia. By 2008, that number increased to 50 million homes and businesses around the globe.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

> Topics: conservation of energy, climate change, global warming

> Location: your home

> Duration: 1 hour

> Cost: Free, not to mention seeing a small decrease your electric bill!

> Gear: A light switch

> Level of Difficulty: REALLY easy

Finally, you can add that very special member to your online social network—your houseplant.

Why would a plant want to join your network? To let you know when it’s thirsty, of course. Also to regularly report on its moisture level and to periodically thank you for watering it.

The network we’re talking about is Twitter, a group-oriented “microblogging” tool. This Web service keeps networks of friends, colleagues, businesses, and total strangers in contact through barrages of short messages known as “tweets.” And everybody from Barack Obama to the New York Times to my niece seems to be Twittering these days.

So why not Phil, the wilting philodendron that lives in your bedroom?

All you need is a clever do-it-yourself kit from a company called Botanicalls (cost: $89.95). With it you can build an electronic moisture-sensing system that enables one lucky houseplant to join your Twitter group. (Have a look at one houseplant’s tweets.)

This is a fairly geeky project, involving circuit boards, capacitors, ethernet cables, and a soldering iron, among other special equipment. But the kit’s instructions look clear, deliberate, and user-friendly. For a preview, see the company’s getting started and assembly page.

FYI, Botanicalls started out several years ago with a kit that enabled your plant to contact you by telephone, which they now call the Classic kit. If you need a break while you’re building the Twitter kit, I recommend you periodically watch the hilarious video that explained the Classic. It’s at the end of this post.

And, check out this scifi short story inspired by this Science Cheerleader blog post!

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Biology, plants, computers, electronics.
> Location: At home, or anywhere you have a plant.
> Duration: About 20 steps to assembly, then installation and testing. Maybe one long session or several separate sessions of a few hours each.
> Cost: $89.95 for the kit, which includes the required electronic components.
> Gear: Basic tools for assembling electronics such as needle-nose pliers, soldering iron, wire snips, etc. A computer with Internet access is also needed.
> Level of difficulty: Pretty technical.

Botanicalls “Classic Kit” Video (a hoot)

Want to gaze at stunning astronomical photographs and help astronomers do their research at the same time? Meet, GalaxyZoo.org, a Web site that enables amateur galaxy analyzers to work from the comfort of their computers.

You don’t need any specialized knowledge. After going through a brief tutorial and qualifying test, you can head to the Galaxy Analysis portion of the site and start reviewing images that need to be cataloged. Just look over each object’s shape and label it with the proper “profile”: spiral galaxy, elliptical galaxy, star, or don’t know.

Volunteers have turned out millions of galaxy classifications, which affiliated scientists will be including in upcoming journal articles. The site reports that last year, its “armchair astronomers” discovered more than “500 overlapping galaxies in the local universe when astronomers had previously only known of 20 such systems.”

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Astronomy, computers.
> Location: At home, office, or anywhere you can get to a computer.
> Duration: As short or as long as you like. It only takes a moment to classify each galaxy.
> Cost: Free.
> Gear: Computer with Internet access.
> Level of difficulty: Easy (after you do the tutorial).

The latest issue of Make magazine (number 15) is devoted to build-them-yourself, high-tech musical instruments. And the coolest of the bunch is this laser harp, at right, being played by its inventor, tech musician Stephen Hobley.

You coax out the computer-generated sounds by waving your hands to break the light beams and change their lengths.

To build a laser harp, you’ll need to be familiar with and fearless about such things as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology, circuit boards, photo cells, voltage regulators, and computers. If you’re not a serious music technology geek who’s been tinkering for years in the garage, you’ll need to buy or scare up a significant amount of hardware and software.

Stephen’s article in Make does include a simpler project—a single-beam “laser theremin,” as opposed to the six-beam laser harp. But even that’s still a pretty complex gizmo.

Whether or not you dive into this project, we’re sure you’ll appreciate the sights and sounds of the harp in action. Check out Stephen’s video demo, below.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Computers, electronics, music, light, sound.
> Location: At home, or in your secret laboratory.
> Cost: $19 for the plans and schematics; order from Stephen Hobley’s Web site. Significant additional cost for parts and equipment.
> Gear: Computer, MIDI utility software, software synthesizer, USB-MIDI interface, soldering equipment, insulated wire, wire cutters and strippers, multimeter, alligator leads, saw, drill, vise and clamps.
> Level of difficulty: Pretty technical.