Citizen Science

The classic “evening star”, Venus (more), is now beginning to make its twinkling debut, and will be a beautiful sparkle to watch throughout the Fall and Winter seasons. Extremely visible to the unaided eye, Venus is a great celestial object for novice sky-watchers to begin learning how to track and enjoy observing the night sky.

Joe Rao, writing for Space.com, provides a nice overview of the Venus experience for 2008-2009… so, grab your binoculars, telescope, or just your family for an evening stroll through the neighborhood and check out the twinkle of Venus this Fall.

As previously reported in the DPRI AmSci Journal (read), this year’s Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting had an wonderfully fresh emphasis on the opportunities for and importance of citizen science.

A professional in the field, Nalini Nadkarni, wrote a nice commentary for The Olympian that describes the new, broad applications for amateur research. The author also remarks on the absolutely critical task of scientists to work toward bring a wider understanding of how our universe functions to a larger audience.

We feel at DPRI that this is a fundamental need, and we’re so excited to see more professional researchers (who are often so buried in their instruments that go “ping!”) are taking seriously the need to bring their work to the masses. This is why we are trying to support citizen science opportunities and are working to bring more people into the world of science… we don’t expect everyone to delve so deep into science that it overtakes their lives, but just enough to increase our appreciation of our amazing universe and to have a bit more understanding of how things really work.

The AmSci Journal has reported on plenty of wonderful citizen science projects from watching fireflies to monitoring plant growth in your own backyard, but now this is some serious amateur research… build your own fusion reactor.

Harnessing the power of nuclear fusion–forcing two or more atoms together so close that they join to create a new, heavier nucleus, and release a ton of energy at the same time–has been the holy grail in nuclear energy research since the 1950s… after uncontrolled nuclear fusion was used to create the powerful hydrogen bomb. Fusion is the process that powers the stars in our universe, and it does not result in piles of radioactive waste that will take eons to decay. So, if nuclear fusion can be generated in the lab and the released energy efficiently exported, then energy for civilian usage could become incredibly cheaper and infinitely safer for our environment.

This noble task has been taken on by a close-knit group of nearly one hundred amateur scientists around the world, many of whom have already built at least one version of a fusion reactor in their home laboratory (i.e., basement, attic, or garage).

Read the following story on Kit Hull and Frank Sanns featured in The Wall Street Journal, and see how amazing the amateur research community can be.

And check out some of the efforts from the “big boys”…