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...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...
...might be tempting to dismiss Galaxy Zoo as just an amusing diversion - fun in an I-play-a-scientist-on-TV kind of way. But astronomers - and volunteers - have made real discoveries by mining its crowd-sourced data. Among them: red spiral galaxies (most spirals are blue), green peas (small but energy-packed, star-spewing galaxies) and Hanny's Voorwerp, an amorphous blue blob spotted by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny Van Arkel, who learned about Galaxy Zoo on the website of Brian May, the former Queen guitarist turned astrophysicist...
This model - their data, your brain - may represent an increasingly common way to handle large data sets. Relatively cheap technology and bandwidth have made data collection almost too easy. Many scientists are now drowning in massive amounts of data, which they don't have the time, resources or brain power to analyze. "In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get," says Lintott, who is also the co-host of the long-running BBC series The Sky at Night. "We're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science...
...estimates that the perfect graduate student - essentially, a human computer that never eats, sleeps or takes a bathroom break - spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week analyzing Galaxy Zoo's data would have needed three to five years to match what Galaxy Zoo's volunteers collectively accomplished in the project's first sixth months...
...right-leaning Telegraph and the more centrist Times of London - would be commercial suicide. The already small readership of the Independent is declining faster than that of its rivals: sales fell 17% in 2009, compared with the 6% to 8% drop-offs for its competitors, according to data released in January by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. (See pictures of London...