#citizen-science — Public Fediverse posts

🔭 The HOYS citizen science project (University of Kent) has published its milestone 400th "light curve of the week". It shows the variable star V908Per in the young cluster IC 348: half-magnitude swings on ever-changing timescales, larger amplitudes at shorter wavelengths – a textbook "Orion Variable". Amateur astronomers take the data; the archive is open.

📅 9 Sep 2026
🔗 https://hoys.space/lightcurve-of-the-week-400/

#CitizenScience #Astronomy #DataScience #Science

Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 German #CitizenScience prize "Wissen der Vielen – Forschungspreis für Citizen Science": https://www.mitforschen.org/forschungspreis-preistraegerinnen

Blick ins Taubertal
Ort: Deutschland, Bayern, Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Autor: Hans-Lothar Kölling
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/2631

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

Wir gratulieren den Wissen der Vielen-Preisträger*innen 2026 von mit:forschen!: Sinja Dittmann (🥇, Plastikverschmutzung @IPN_Kiel), Anna Eiser-Kösterfunke (🥈, Gesundheitsversorgung) und Christoph Koch (🥉, Bodenqualität) 🏆
ℹ️ https://www.mitforschen.org/forschungspreis/preistraegerinnen2026

#WissenDerVielen26 #Partizipation #CitizenScience #Wissenschaft #Forschung

I'm investigating whether MEMS microphones can be used for DIY monitoring of low-frequency sound and infrasound around hyperscale #DataCenters.

I'm considering a small run of breakout PCBs so the microphones can be tested sans SMT assembly. This could be useful to communities trying to independently characterize data-center noise.

https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=1240

#DataCenter #DataCenters #Infrasound #LowFrequencyNoise #NoisePollution #MEMS #ESP32 #Electronics #OpenHardware #CitizenScience #Acoustics

Learned today about Strandliners, a #citizenscience collective that dealt with #pollution by pellets ecaping onto Camber Sands due to an issue at its nearby wastewater site (reporting links are now closed)
https://strandliners.org/bio-beads-at-camber/

OMG! This is brilliant. The King of Citizen Science, @mhaklay.bsky.social, who catalyzed my idea for #UCLChemAirPoll is now bridged across to Mastodon. I strongly recommend you follow him if you are interested in harnessing people power to gather data to change the world. #citizenscience #crowdsourcing #learning #data

Blick von der Sandgrube Ebersbach
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Ebersbach
Autor: Bruno Häcker
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/1778

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

Follow-up: I went further down the data-center #Infrasound rabbit hole. A noise complaint 2.464 miles from a data center led me to explore a <$100 ESP32 + differential-pressure-sensor logger, calibration, wind filtering and raw spectral data--and I found others doing related field research.

https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=1223

#DataCenters #Noise #ESP32 #CitizenScience

I'm exploring a DIY instrument to measure infrasound (<20 Hz) and low-frequency emissions near data centers, to complement a Class 2 sound-level meter.

Thinking ESP32 + differential pressure sensor + wind filtering + raw spectral analysis. Interested in comparing designs, calibration methods, and field measurements. Anyone else working on this or interested in collaborating?

#DataCenters #Infrasound #LowFrequencyNoise #Acoustics #CitizenScience #ESP32 #Oregon

🔭 Citizen science in Czechia: on the morning of 8 Sep 2026, asteroid (712) Boliviana will occult star TYC 1348-00100-1 (10.9 mag) in Gemini for up to 3.5 s. The 132 km wide shadow path crosses the country from Šumava (02:38:29 UT) to the Beskydy mountains, 29° above the eastern horizon. Every timing — positive or negative — refines the asteroid's shape and orbit. (7 Sep 2026)

#CitizenScience #Astronomy #Space #Science
https://www.astro.cz/clanky/ukazy/zakryje-simon-jose-antonio-hvezdu.html

🌌 Open data: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have published Data Release 11 — the largest 2D map of the Universe so far. 5.6 trillion pixels, nearly 4 billion objects, 75% of the sky, 263,000 exposures merged in eight weeks of supercomputing. Free via the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer and Astro Data Lab, and open to citizen scientists hunting lenses and transients. (4 Sep 2026)

#DataScience #CitizenScience #Astronomy #Space
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-desi-legacy-imaging-survey-releases-the-largest-2-d-map-of-the-universe

Weiden und Felder bei Reichenbach
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Reichenbach O.L.
Autor: Hans-Lothar Kölling
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/2425

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

Lost Bones #7 is now published!
In 1929, a nearly ten-pound mammoth molar was discovered west of New Ulm, Minnesota. It was donated to the University of Minnesota—and then effectively disappeared into nearly a century of museum transfers.

A Mighty Beast follows my seven-year search for the tooth, from a single entry in a 1945 paleontological survey to its eventual rediscovery in a museum collection.

Substack: https://marcusbrandel.substack.com/p/lost-bones-7-a-mighty-beast

#CitizenScience #LostBones #Paleontology #MammothMonday

An den Quitzdorfer Teichen
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Quitzdorf am See
Autor: Bruno Häcker
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/2745

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

🪐 A giant ten-sided jet stream wave encircles Saturn's south pole. Amateur astronomers spotted the first hints in images shared through the open PVOL archive run by the University of the Basque Country; Hubble's OPAL programme then traced it back to 2023. A neat case of worldwide observer data leading to a discovery. ESA/Hubble, 2 Sep 2026.

https://esahubble.org/news/heic2612/

#CitizenScience #Astronomy #ESA #Space

📡 Images from the Radio Galaxy Zoo citizen science project were used to pretrain very small vision models (~6M parameters) with LeJEPA. A University of Geneva team shows that self-supervised learning directly on radio astronomy data matches far larger models at radio galaxy morphology classification — cheaper and more scalable. Preprint, 31 Aug 2026.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30594

#RadioAstronomy #CitizenScience #DataScience #Astronomy

🔭 The SNAD team shows how to pair machine learning with a domain expert in the loop. On top of public ZTF survey data they built Coniferest, an open-source active-learning library, the Transient Miner and the SNAD Viewer web portal. Result: 100+ new supernova candidates, red dwarf flares and young stellar objects. Overview published 31 Aug 2026.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30477

#DataScience #CitizenScience #Astronomy #Science

📻 Radio meteors, August 2026: Felix Verbelen's monthly report of reflections recorded at Kampenhout (BE) on the VVS beacon frequency of 49.99 MHz. The Perseids peaked on 13 Aug; 52 reflections lasting over a minute were logged across the month. Raw hourly counts are published as CSV, ready for your own analysis.

📅 4 Sep 2026
🔗 https://www.emeteornews.net/2026/09/04/radio-meteors-august-2026/

#RadioAstronomy #CitizenScience #DataScience #Science

🔭 HOYS (Hunting Outbursting Young Stars) presents the light curve of the young star MO Mon, sitting in a small dark globule beside the Cone Nebula in NGC 2264. V and R band data covering 120 days show deep dips of up to 1.5 mag recurring at semi-regular intervals. All measurements come from amateur observers.

📅 4 Sep 2026
🔗 https://hoys.space/lightcurve-of-the-week-399/

#CitizenScience #Astronomy #DataScience #Science

Alter Kalkofen bei Charlottenhof
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Charlottenhof, Schöpstal
Autor: Bruno Häcker
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/1777

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

For #FossilFriday—dinosaurs headline the Minnesota State Fair, but an Ice Age predator is also on display!

These 26,900-year-old Homotherium serum fossils from Tyson Spring Cave include a skullcap, shoulder blade and foreleg. Found beginning in 2008, they provided the first record of this scimitar-toothed cat in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region.

See them through Sept. 7!

#LostBones #Homotherium #Pleistocene #Paleontology #CitizenScience Skull credit: Illinois State Museum (Facebook)

Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?

Study: Land use is the biggest factor in determining decomposition rates of organic cotton underpants.

Jennifer Ouellette – Aug 27, 2026

Excerpt: "A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world. The results of this unique experiment were reported in a new paper published in the journal #PlantsPeoplePlanet.

" 'Our results show that how soil is managed can significantly affect both soil life and soil quality,' said co-author Marcel van der Heijden, an #agroecologist at the University of Zurich. 'Healthy, biologically active soil is crucial for fertility, nutrient cycling and many other #ecosystem services.'

" #SoilHealth is critical for #agriculture and, by extension, #FoodSecurity, not to mention a healthy #GlobalEcosystem, but it has been declining worldwide, per the authors. One key indicator of soil health is #decomposition rates of complex organic matter, breaking down stuff like leaves, wood, even cadavers into simpler organic and inorganic compounds, releasing C02 and nutrients in the process. There have been relatively few large-scale national decomposition studies involving different land use types, although smaller studies have shown that how humans use a site can significantly affect the soil’s biological diversity.

"Commercially available teabags are a common material used to measure decomposition rates, known as the #TeabagIndex ( #TBI ). However, Van der Heijden and colleagues felt the teabag index could be improved upon, given that it requires careful handling and specific tools, like a fine-scale balance. They opted for a more playful approach to illustrate soil composition.

"Prior research had shown that cotton strips could also be used to assess decomposition, so why not engage in a bit of #CitizenScience and ask volunteers to bury cotton underpants for a couple of months, then dig them up and record the results? That’s exactly what the authors did in a national project they dubbed 'Proof by Underpants.' "

Read more:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/why-did-1000-swiss-citizens-bury-their-underpants/

#SolarPunkSunday #CitizenScientists #MeasuringSoilHealth #SoilMicrobes #Gardening #Soil #SoilQuality

Canadian Wildlife Federation: New App Encourages Canadians to Explore Aquatic Barriers Blocking Fish Migration. “The Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) is calling on all Canadians to help monitor freshwater connectivity through the new Canadian Fish Passage Assessment (CANFISHPASS) app, a free mobile tool that helps identify barriers potentially restricting fish movement in rivers, streams and […]

Wachtberg (Taubenheim)/"Wacheberg"
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Sohland an der Spree, Taubenheim
Autor: Falko Knopf
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/1542

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography

Kunnersdorf Ortsteil Liebstein
Ort: Deutschland, Sachsen, Kunnersdorf
Autor: Bruno Häcker
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://landschaftsfotoportal.senckenberg.de/item/1623

#CitizenScience #landscape #photography