The Community Catalog (https://community-catalog.zooniverse.org) is a custom tool to offer Zooniverse project participants the opportunity to explore a project dataset, and to allow our team to experiment with creating new pathways into classifying. We wanted to create a digital space that would facilitate not only sharing, but also discovery of participants’ contributions alongside institutional information ..read more

Guest post written by Monteé Ellis, Junior Designer with the Zooniverse team at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago from May – July 2024. Before joining the Zooniverse team, Monteé embarked on an incredible journey as an intern with i.c.stars. This rigorous 4-month program wasn’t just about learning IT and software engineering skills; it was a comprehensive experience designed to open doors to economic mobility. Monteé gained invaluable job experience and honed his leadership abilities, setting the stage for his future success. After his role within the Zooniverse, Monteé will join the United Air ..read more

Dear Zooniverse Community, We’re pleased to update you on an important development as we undergo a migration to a new frontend codebase over the course of 2024-2025. This transition brings a fresh and improved experience to our platform. From a participant’s perspective, the primary changes involve project layout and styling, resulting in a more user-friendly interface. Importantly, these updates don’t impact your stats (e.g,. classification count), Collections, Favorites, etc. To offer you a sneak peek, check out the updated design and layout on projects that have already migrated, such as ..read more

I’m thrilled to share some exciting news with you all! Zooniverse, our beloved platform for people-powered research, has been honored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as a champion of open science.  The OSTP Year of Open Science Recognition Challenge awarded five different projects, including Zooniverse, as ‘Champions of Open Science’ for our work to promote open science to tackle a unique problem. To check out the full announcement and see the other winners, click here. We’re deeply honored by this recognition. It underscores our commitment to Open Scien ..read more

What is Snapshot Wisconsin? Snapshot Wisconsin is a community science project where the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (Wisconsin DNR) partners with volunteers to monitor wildlife using a statewide network of trail cameras. Volunteers host trail cameras, which are triggered by heat and movement, capturing pictures of passing animals. Located in the Great Lakes region of the United States, Wisconsin hosts a variety of habitats from coniferous forest to prairies. Wisconsin is home 65 species of native mammals, hundreds of other vertebrate species, and thousands of invertebrates and n ..read more

Happy New Year Everyone! We can’t thank you enough for making Zooniverse possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!! We have so much to celebrate from 2023.  We welcomed our 2.5 millionth registered participant! To date: 2.6 million registered participants from 190 countries Top countries in 2023: US, UK, Germany, India, Canada, Australia 400 Zooniverse projects publicly launched 40 new projects in 2023 alone; ~90 active projects at any given time Each led by a different research team. Zooniverse partners with hundreds of universities, research institutes, museums, libraries ..read more

We are excited to share with you results from two Zooniverse projects, ‘Etch A Cell – Fat Checker’ and ‘Etch A Cell – Fat Checker Round 2’. Over the course of these two projects, more than 2000 Zooniverse volunteers contributed over 75 thousand annotations! One of the core aims of these two projects was to enable the design and implementation of machine learning approaches that could automate the annotation of fat droplets in novel data sets, to provide a starting point for other research teams attempting to perform similar tasks. With this in mind, we have developed multiple machine learning ..read more

Introducing Etch a Cell – Demolition Squad Earlier this year, the team behind the Etch A Cell series of citizen science projects launched their latest project; ‘Etch A Cell – Demolition Squad’. Through this project, researchers based at the Francis Crick Institute (London, UK) have teamed up with Zooniverse volunteers to study ‘lysosomes’. What are lysosomes? Lysosomes are balloon-shaped organelles contain a range of enzymes that can break down biological substances including proteins, sugars, and fats. These enzymes allow lysosomes to function as the cell’s digestive system; lysosomes digest ..read more

Name: Ramana Sankar Location: University of California, Berkeley Tell us about your role within the team: I’ve been with the Zooniverse team for two years now as a postdoc working with Lucy Fortson at University of Minnesota. My main role was to help with building human-machine interfaces for project teams on Zooniverse (particularly in the avenue of speeding up project completion rates and improving avenues serendipitous discovery), and also with providing data science assistance to projects. What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse? I did my Ph.D. at Florida Institute of Technolog ..read more

For more than a decade, I’ve been ending talks by looking forward to the rich data that will soon begin flowing from the Vera Rubin Observatory. The observatory’s magnificent new telescope, nearing its long-awaited first light on a mountaintop in Chile, will conduct a ten year survey of the sky, producing 30 TB of images and maybe ten million alerts a night, covering everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.  The Vera Rubin Observatory Building, ready for action. The Observatory has – from really early on – seen citizen science, and in particular working with the Zooniverse, as an im ..read more