Instant Genius - Chris Lintott: Can members of the public do real science?

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

We’re living in the age of big data. Scientists can collect and store more information than ever before. So how can they manage it all? That’s where citizen science comes in. Members of the public can log in to the Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science platform, and do the hard work of sorting through the data. Whether that’s searching for alien planets or spotting penguins, the project’s co-founder Chris Lintott says that the public aren’t just helping out, but doing real science. In his new book, The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse (£20, OUP), Chris explains how, in just a few minutes in your lunch break, you can contribute to fields from astronomy to zoology. He speaks to BBC Science Focus online assistant Sara Rigby. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Jim Al-Khalili: Why should we care about science and scientists? Randall Munroe: How do you find the worst solution to any problem? Dr Tilly Blyth: How has art influenced science? Does data discriminate against women? – Caroline Criado Perez How can we save our planet? – Sir David Attenborough Monica Grady: What is the future of space science? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Amy Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. We're living in the age of big data. Scientists can collect and store more information than ever before, so how can they manage it all? That's where citizen science comes in. Members of the public can log into the Zooniverse, the world's largest citizen science platform,

and do the hard work of sorting through the data, whether that's searching for alien planets or spotting penguins, the project's co-founder Chris Lintot says the public aren't just helping out but doing real science. In his new book, The Crowd and the Cosmos, Chris explains how in just a few minutes in your lunch break, you can contribute to fields from astronomy to zoology. So first of all, can you please just describe your zooniverse project? Sure, Zuniverse started out as an answer to a very simple problem, which is that we had too many galaxies, which is something that I think a lot of people face in the 21st century. We needed to sort the galaxies out by shape and had discovered,

mostly by experiment, that PhD students weren't willing to look at more than about 50,000 galaxies themselves. And so in desperation, we asked the public for help way back in 2007 and got this enormous reaction. So Zuniverse is a platform that lets researchers of all kinds ask for help with their data. We've had people count penguins and transcribe ancient properties. Pyrai, sort through old weather records, discover galaxies, look for planets and all sorts of other things in what we tend to call citizen science. So what is the value of getting the public involved in doing these sorts of tasks? Well, that's an interesting question because we changed our mind about that over the course

of the project. So to begin with, I think we thought the value was that we simply couldn't sort through the volume of data that we had. the help of the public. So we had a million galaxies. We just couldn't look at all of them ourselves. The test satellite, NASA's latest planet hunter, observes 30,000 stars in great detail every month. We can't possibly sit and go through all of that data ourselves.

So partly the value is that by collaborating with large numbers of the public, we're actually able to do science that we can't do any other way, that we can get through the, large data sets. But over time, we realize that's only half the point. When you invite people, when you invite anyone to come and look at your data, they find things that are of interest to them that maybe you didn't even dream of looking at. And so there are lots of cases where the volunteers on the projects have become interested in particular objects or type of objects. And they've prodded us to be interested in those objects too. So the kind of science we do has changed because we've

have the public involved. A nice example of that is a set of small, round, green galaxies called the Galaxy Zoo Peas by volunteers, because they're small, round, and green. And these things have been in the background of images that astronomers have been using since at least the 1950s. But no one had looked at them, and so no one had realized that they were unusual. It was only when the Galaxy Zoo volunteers got together and started looking for the properties of these galaxies, that we realized that they were pretty special indeed. They're the most efficient factories of stars in the local universe. So these are small galaxies that for reasons we don't quite understand

have decided to turn all their gas into stars right now and why they're doing that and how they're doing that and how they're affecting their environments are things that we desperately want to know. But we didn't even know that those questions were worth asking until the volunteers sent us an email and started talking about these strange P galaxies. Yeah, so it sounds like there's a lot of value to the scientists from getting the public involved, but what would you say is the value to the public of getting involved with science?

Well, we know that lots of our volunteers find it fun. That's the first thing. I think it's sort of inspiring, hopefully, to be part of the scientific adventure. You know, I'm used to giving talks or presenting TV programs to an audience who have come to learn about science, But it's a very different experience to be doing some yourself. And hopefully one of the things these projects do is break down the boundary between those of us who are lucky enough to get to do science for a living. And everyone else who might be interested might be a fan of science, but who doesn't normally get to play. It's a bit like, I think, I'm a football fan and I've spent years watching my team play, despite the revelation that about the age of seven that I was never going to be good enough to.

to get on the pitch, but suddenly this is like finding a way to take part in a match. So I think partly it's collaborative like that. There are other benefits as well. I think something like 10% of volunteers in the original Galaxy Zoo told us that they liked taking part in the project because they liked having space to think about the vastness of the universe. And so I think for many people, that sense of spending a little bit of time, particularly in the astronomical projects in the universe, is extremely.

extremely enticing. We see that as well with projects like Penguin Watch, where people are counting penguins in the Antarctic. There's something nice about visiting the Antarctic for a few minutes every day and helping out there. But most people just want to help. So we know from surveys and from talking to volunteers that mostly people are doing this out of altruism, out of wanting to help scientists and help, I guess all of us progress with understanding the universe. I think that's kind of interesting. We're used to talking about people on the internet or people on the web or crowds on the web as being a negative thing. You think of online bullying and so on. And I wouldn't dismiss the importance of those things. But this is a crowd on the internet who are committed to doing good and to helping explore the universe. And I find that kind of inspiring. So the idea of citizen science, it feels like quite a new idea, you know, getting, as you say,

crowds on the internet to come and altruistically help scientists out with projects. But it's actually got a fairly long history, hasn't it? So could you please just take us on a brief tour of the history of citizen science? Sure. This has been one of the most fun parts of writing the book and thinking about citizen science in this way, is the ability to dig a bit deeper. So I knew that there was a long astronomical history. There are surveys of stars, of stellar behaviour going back to about the

early 19th century by organized groups of amateurs. And so when I thought about historical citizen science, that's what I had in my head. It actually goes back further than that. There's a great story of Edmund Hanley, who was an astronomer here in Oxford, obviously the man for whom the comet was named, who in 1715 wanted to try and track the path of an eclipse, a total solar eclipse, which was crossing Britain. And so he realized he couldn't cover the whole ground himself. So he wrote to the professors of astronomy at Oxford and Cambridge to ask them to make observations.

And he also issued a map which you could have bought for a penny, which showed the likely path and asked anyone who read it to make detailed timings of the start and the middle and the end of the eclipse and send them into hellie. Now, in Oxford it was a good job he did that because in Oxford it was cloudy. in Cambridge, the observatory records show that it was clear. The eclipse was observed, but the professor there was, he says, oppressed by too much company. And so I think that means a whole bunch of people turned up and wanted to talk to him. So he didn't get to take detailed measurements. And Halley ended up getting about 200 different submissions from all over the country

from people who'd taken detailed measurements. And so that formed the basis of a refinement. model of the solar system. So I think that's the oldest instance of scientific crowdsourcing. But you can go back through 19th century weather records, the people who cataloged bird life in great detail, particularly in North America and here in the UK as well, and find that there's this old tradition of people putting some of their spare time into providing scientific data. And I think what's really happened is that that form of science that involves all sorts of people and people donating their time goes right the way back. And it's obscured slightly by the 20th century, which is, of course, the time when universities took over science, where it became normal for you to sit in a building like the one.

I'm in now in a big research laboratory and get paid to do science. We're actually with this sort of modern citizen science going back to the roots of scientific discovery. as something in which anyone can play a part. Yeah. One of my favourite stories of the history of citizen science from your book, The Grand of the Cosmos, it was not actually one of the more successful ones. It was the story of Benjamin Robbins.

Oh, I love this story. Yes, yes. There's poor Benjamin Robbins. I feel for him slightly. He had a brilliant start his career and got recognised by the Royal Society and so on, and then didn't get a job he wanted as Professor of Ballistics, but he was trying to understand how rockets work, actually how they move and whether they, you know, how high above the ground they can get.

He's interested in them because they might be weapons. But there's a great firework displaying Green Park in London in 1749. And so he decides to study this. And he writes these incredibly detailed instructions, which he publishes in the Gentleman's Magazine, which was well read at the time. And he asked everyone from around London to look towards Green Park and measure how high the fireworks appear in the sky from their location. And then to send them in. And he hopes from this information to be able to work out what's going on. Well, the firework display was a great success.

The rest of the event was less so. I think the tent that they'd built as the centerpiece of the celebrations burnt down. Robbins didn't make any observations himself. and no one, well, almost no one, uh, sent in observations apart from one Welshman who'd been observing from Abigavenny, uh, who said that he could see the fireworks clearly and complained about the cost, uh, and such a display in London that could be seen from what, 150 miles away. So, so not, not a successful example of crowdsourcing, but there's some lessons in there.

I went back. I went to the Royal Society and they hamped the, uh, 18th century gentleman's magazine and they pulled it down and you can read the. instructions from Robbins. And there's a couple of pages about exactly what your servants need to do and how to measure the height of the rocket. You have to see if I work next to say a church tower a few miles away. Then the next day you have to go out with a sextant and measure the height of the tower and then do some simple calculations. And he's describing all of this in, I don't know, the equivalent of something like the spectator or something, you know, or all the Sunday Times magazine or something. So it's not utterly surprising that Robin's.

didn't succeed. But I think he gets credit for trying. Yeah, so we can learn from that that maybe simpler instructions are better in the case. Simple instructions. And if you're asking people to rely on their servants to make the measurements, then you've probably got a problem. Maybe that was true in the 18th century too. So in a lot of these historical cases, there was a bit of discussion about who was doing the real science, as it were. So whether members of the public who were gathering data are actually doing science, or whether that's the people who are gathering all the data together and making analysis of them.

Yeah, I talked about this in the book in the context. So I got to learn a lot about the history of sort of weather forecasting and meteorology. And there's some really nice examples of this with some of the early observers who went up in hot air balloons, which were really dramatic. My favorite illustration in the book is this amazing picture of a scientist called Glacier. who is associated with the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and his pilot, Henry Coxwell, who were up in one of these balloons above the clouds. And Glacier is basically unconscious in the basket,

while Coxwell is climbing up into the rigging to rescue the balloon and save the scientific mission and indeed both of the men. But in that context, when Glacier writes about what happened, it's very clear that he's the scientist and that Coxwell is just the pilot. Whereas actually, I think these days you talk about them both being on the adventure together. So this echoes down the centuries. You can see it in things like, well, I mentioned Greenwich. The Royal Observatory used to employ what were known as calculators who were people.

Originally, mostly women who have the technical skills to do complex mathematical calculations, but not the formal educational background to write up the results as astronomical results. So the Greenwich calculators, I think we could argue, were as much contributors to the science as the Astronomer Royal, who ran the observatory at the time. But they weren't giving credit for much of that. That comes up today because one of the criticisms of the Zooniverse that people make is that it's sort of one-directional, that the real science, whatever that is, is being done by me and my teams here. And that all we're asking people to do is to click through and classify. And so it can be seen as sort of drudge work. And there are a couple of arguments there.

One is that it's actually a lot of fun. I would rather happy, happily sit and classify galaxies most mornings instead of doing, you know, the grand paperwork that I have to do a lot of the time. But the second thing is that I don't think you could draw a boundary on who's doing science and who isn't. There's this great enterprise of trying to increase our knowledge. of the universe. And it takes all sorts of people from people who build cameras, to people who ran the surveys that took the data that we're using, to the computer programmers who wrote the programs that turn that data into images that are worth looking at through to people who look at

the images and then the theorists who whose theories we're testing. So I think you couldn't draw a line at any point in that sequence and say, okay, anyone passed this line as a scientist. And so the volunteers really are welcome to cross over. Some just so just by participating, I think people are becoming scientists, so doing science. Some of them go on and do much more than just click. So one of the most surprising things has been watching people not only discover unusual objects, but become more advanced scientists themselves. This has happened particularly in a project called Planet Hunters, where we've been looking and

finding planets around stars other than the sun using data from a couple of NASA satellites. Planet Hunters simply amaze me. I thought that planet hunters would fail. For starters, it's a project that asks you not to look at a beautiful picture of a galaxy, but it asks you to look at a graph and have fun doing that because you're looking at data. And secondly, we're looking for the repeating pattern that indicates a... position of a planet. And that's something computers are pretty good at. But we found that because there's noise in the data, because stars are actually quite complex, and because planets can have

quite subtle signals, we've been able to find planets. But some of the volunteers on planet hunters have over the years gone from people who came in and just started clicking and classifying to people capable of running their own research projects and writing their own scientific papers. And so that's been good to see. But I couldn't tell you at any point, in their careers, the citizen scientists, at which point they became a proper scientist. I think you're a proper scientist if you've got questions to ask about the universe, and if you do something about that, like participating in one of our projects. Right. So I, you know, I don't have a PhD. I don't work in a university,

so I could go on the Zuniverse website, or, you know, any of our listeners could go on the Zuniverse website, take part in a project and justifiably call myself a science. Yeah, absolutely. We are all capable of being scientists. Science is about two things. It's sort of pattern recognition, spotting that something is happening in the world. That's a talent that evolution has happily gifted us all with.

And it's about sort of developing hypotheses, developing ideas about the universe. And what you'll find is if you pick one of our projects, I know, like Penguin Watch, for example, or snapshot Serengeti, which is looking at beautiful pictures, which are captured by motion-sensitive cameras in the Serengeti National Park. If you take part in Snapshot Serengeti, you'll find that it doesn't take you too long to start spontaneously thinking of hypotheses.

You might notice that the wildebeest turn up at dawn or dusk, or maybe they're only in images from particular sites, or maybe you only see them in places where the grass is flat. And those are all scientific questions, and they're exactly the kind of scientific questions that the Snapshot Serengetti team are trying to answer with the data. And so I think this is absolutely true. I think you can all call yourself scientists with the investment of a few minutes worth of clicking around and participation. That's really exciting. So what is it that you think drives tens of thousands of people to go on your website and classify galaxies or transcribe ship logs?

I think it's partly, as I said, it's partly that people like to be helpful. So I think the sense that you've done something useful is very, very rewarding. I think that's certainly true. I think in some of the projects, many of the projects, maybe there's a sort of attraction of the idea. Planet hunters advertise itself by saying you could discover a planet. And that's kind of exciting to add to your day, I think, even if the odds are pretty long. I think sometimes the images are beautiful. I got very excited about a project called Plankton Portal,

which was using these amazing pictures that were taken. There were sort of shadow photographs of plankton off the coast of Florida, and these things have the most intricate and amazing shapes. Plus the science team told me that in there somewhere, there were plankton that were shaped like the alien from alien, and I was desperate to try and find those. But I never quite found that particular type. but I found the shapes of that rather beautiful, and so I had a great time exploring.

People have all sorts of motivations for coming and trying it, but I would say to your listeners, just come and give a project to go, pick one at random, and you might be surprised by what you become interested in. Certainly, I had no interest in plankton before I started participating in these projects. And I think there's a lesson there for those of us who talk about science. I think we're often guilty of assuming that we know what people want to be interested in. You know, I'm much more likely to get a science story, a physics story onto television if it's related in some way to your kitchen or to, you know, life, everyday life. Whereas actually, I think people can be surprised.

I mean, your readers and listeners will know this, of course, but people can be surprised that you find yourself reading or thinking about black holes one day or plankton or penguin behavior the next. And I think Zooniverse is a way of kick-starting your curiosity and giving yourself a lot more richness in what you can be interested in in the world. And it's not just science either, is it? It's broadened a bit. So I saw on your website there's some historical. Yes.

Yeah, we ended up with a historical project partly by accident, really. And one of the first projects we did, which still runs, is a project called Old Weather. And Old Weather was an attempt to help researchers at the Met Office who were trying to test, well, researchers all around the world who try and test the computers that they use to predict climate over time. And the way you test those things is that you test that you can predict the past. Because if you can do a good job of predicting the past where you know what the right answer was, then you know you can do a good job of predicting the future. future. But our record of weather in the past is pretty spotty, actually. We don't have much data beyond further back than the start of the 20th century, particularly for places that aren't on the eastern coast of the US or in Western Europe. And so the old weather, the old weather team

realized that there was data locked up in ships logs. And so we started off trying to transcribe most of the early 20th century Royal Naval logs because it turns out every Royal Navy ship every four hours records the weather

in great detail but these are all in handwritten logs so old weather was a project about transcribing these wind records, weather records and so on but actually the volunteers got very interested in the notes

that were in the margins of these logs yes they were happy to transcribe the weather but there was a ship which recorded the fact that its entire chocolate ration had been lost overboard which captured people's imagination. People started spotting the names of individual sailors or officers in these logs and got interest in that. And pretty quickly, we found we were running a history project that did weather records on the side. And so that inspired us. And so we've now built several projects that look at, we looked at the history of

First World War, we have a collaboration with tape modern to look at artist records, and we're starting to do more of those things as well. There's data locked up, not just in images, but in text. And we'd like any researchers who think they can collaborate with the crowd to come and talk to us. Some of the projects that you have on your website, they sound like the sort of things that could be done certainly faster by computers. So there's artificial intelligence and machine learning that can start to recognize patterns. So if you have a Facebook account, then it can quickly start spotting your face in people's photos, for example. So why would researchers choose to use human power over computer power? So it's a really interesting example that you brought up there

with Facebook. So Facebook's face recognition technology is excellent. And it's excellent because we all spent most of a decade labeling faces for Facebook as we went through and sort of out our friends and clicked and said, yes, this is Luke and this is Amanda or whoever else. So that illustrates that modern machine learning depends to a large extent on the size of the training set you can provide. So in many cases, our projects are from fields where there simply isn't a large enough training set. Maybe the projects might aim even at producing a training set so that machines can later on take on more of the work. You can see that bit in the Snapshot Serengeti project that I mentioned earlier. The researchers behind that

project wanted to know about 50 different species of animal and some are easy to find and some are not. So probably the easiest I think is the giraffe. Everyone down to a four-year-old and younger knows what a giraffe looks like. They're pretty distinctive and so I'm pleased to say that Zuniverse helped develop the world's best giraffe spotting algorithm. And now we can find the drafts automatically, which is exciting and, as you can imagine, useful in everyday life. But they're also interested at the other end of the scale in small skunk-like things called serrillas. And I'd never heard of a zirilla before we got involved in this project. But they appear in about one in every three or four million pictures. And so it's going to take an awfully long time before we can build up a decent

training set at serrillas. And so we will need people to spot the rarer things. Another reason why, you might work with people rather than with a computer is that people deal with surprise better. An example is a project called Spacewamps where we were looking for distant galaxies whose light has been bent by passage through the nearby universe. These galaxies are distorted and they're often magnified. So these gravitational lenses give you a really good chance to see the distant universe. so they're highly sought after by astronomers. We only know of about a thousand of them.

So doing a training set is quite difficult. And when we set the project up, all the examples we showed people were blue. They were these star-forming galaxies, so they're bright blue, and they appear as little blue arcs. And the first thing the volunteers found was a distant red ring, which turned out to be this really interesting galaxy that we're seeing as it was when the universe was just a couple of billion years old. So that's a really nice example. The astrophysics is interesting, but a computer trained on blue arcs isn't going to be able to recognize that the red ring is worth looking at, whereas people made that jump intuitively. So when you want to look for the unusual, when you want to look for the rare, when you want to look for the unexpected, you need to turn to citizen science. Now, actually, I think the future, and this is where the book ends up, is a collaboration between human and machine.

So 12 years after we started Galaxy Zoo, if you go to Galaxy Zoo now, you can click a button that says enhanced. And what that will do is allow you to classify alongside a machine. So you still get an image of a galaxy. We still want to know what shape the galaxy is. We're working our way through the southern part of the sky, which we haven't been able to look at in this detail before. But the galaxies, you'll see if you click that button, are selected by a machine to be the ones where it needs human help. and so we're using the machines to speed things up and then getting human intuition in

to help with the unusual or the odd or the interesting. And that works quite well because it means the machines do the boring bit of the work and we get to see the interesting or unusual galaxies. We've got to work in this sort of hybrid way. I'm involved in a project called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is a terrible name. But this is a telescope that's being built in Chile

that will cover the, it's as big as the biggest telescopes we have today, but it's going to scan the whole sky every three nights, and it's going to transmit an alert whenever it spots that something has changed. And we're arguing about it, but we think a conservative estimate is that the LSST project will spit out about 10 million alerts a night. And so if you want to filter those to find what you're expecting, well, you might use a machine. But if you want to sort through those to find the interesting unusual stuff, we're going to need citizen scientists to look at some proportion of that data.

We'll use the machines to get rid of the known stuff, and then we'll all need to muck in and help us help identify the really interesting and unusual stuff that's hidden in that dataset. What would you say is the most exciting discovery that has been made thanks to the help of the Zooniverse? that's like trying to pick my own my favourite child or something I think the most fun was something called Borrejin star or Tabby star it's sometimes known or to our volunteers

this was the WTF star for a while which we probably don't need to go into now so this is a star that behaves like almost nothing else so it was observed by NASA's Kepler planet hunting telescope and it did nothing in particular for a long while And then suddenly for a period of a few hours, it got 20% fainter and then got brighter.

And then it did nothing for about another year. And then for about a month, it blinked dramatically and repeatedly. And no one understood what was going on with the style. We tried pretty much everything we could think of to see if we could come up with a prosaic explanation. We even got to give you some idea of how far in the weeds we went. We got down to, I should have said, this was spotted by our volunteers. And they helped. But between us.

We got as far as checking which pixel on the camera each observation was made with because we were worried that it was just an artificial effect. It wasn't that. The star appeared completely normal. People talked about whether there was a disk of dust, the kind of stuff you might form planets out of surrounding the star. But we ruled that out. We got a little bit desperate. And in the paper we said, well, maybe it's a stream of comets in orbit around the star. and each comet getting in front of the star would cause a dip.

Turns out that this would be the biggest comet ever discovered, and it would have had to have disintegrated just as we started observing, which is on too many coincidences for my taste. And then a group of astronomers led by Jason Wright in the States published a paper suggesting that this thing might be surrounded by an alien megastructure. So the idea is that if you have an alien civilization constructing space-based solar panels and those panels got in the way at the star, then you'd see exactly this. So for a little while, we were fielding questions about whether our volunteers had found aliens

or not. We think we've managed to rule that out, but the star's still a mystery. It's not only, it's undergone more of these dramatic blinks since. And it also seems to be fading slowly over the course of the last hundred years. We found some historical observations. And so this is one star that's doing something that no other star we've ever observed is. And that to me is fascinating and interesting. And five years on, we're still arguing about and observing it and trying to work out what is happening. But that's a really nice example of the kind of discovery we can make with citizen science. That's a bunch of volunteers led by a guy called Darrell Lacource, who were looking for planets, were distracted by the star that was doing something very different,

that came up with their own ideas about it, that told us about it. it that challenged astronomers to explain what they found and then completely confused us. And so following that story and being part of that excitement has been great. So I think that's probably my favourite. I'm a big fan of space and astronomy. So what projects are there on the Zooniverse at the minute that you would recommend that I get involved in? Well, Galaxy Zoo, obviously is excellent. I think a project that's pretty close to my heart because I

too like space is a project called Planet 4. So one of my great regrets in my life is that I grew up as a kid interested in astronomy and I was particularly interested in our solar system.

And somewhere along the way I got distracted and ended up working on galaxies and so on. But in my heart, I think I would love to have been a planetary scientist. And so Planet 4 is our Mars project. It uses a NASA satellite called Mars reconnaissance orbiter, which has this enormous camera on the front that takes pictures that would show you, if there were such a thing, a coffee table on Mars. If you've seen or your listeners have seen the pictures where you can actually see the individual Mars rovers and their tracks on the

surface, those are from MRO. And we're looking with Planet Forward a really interesting part of the planet. We're looking at the polar regions where there are features that are called spiders. So this really is spiders on Mars. And these are cracks in the ground that grow when in the spring, where what happens is the ice that's underneath the surface warms up. And then suddenly you get a geyser shooting up from the surface and disrupting the dust. And you're left with these cracks that look a bit like sort of very tenderly spiders. one had produced a catalogue of these, no one had systematically looked at them, and that's what Planet 4 is doing. We're discovering really interesting things about how Mars changes from year to

year and from season to season. So I think it's a really nice way to think about Mars as a planet. And because we're working closely with the Mars reconnaissance orbiter team, we've even based on discoveries that people have made, retargeted the spacecraft to take new pictures. So if you want, see, for anyone interested in space, the idea that something you do on a website might cause NASA to take a picture of something around Mars is, I think, really exciting. So I've been participating in that project myself as a volunteer because I'd quite like to go and prod MRI and see if I can get my own picture from Mars back. Great. I will check that out. Thank you very much. Cool. Excellent. Yeah. Well, let me know if you find anything and we'll call NASA together.

That was Chris Lindt, talking about Citizens, Science in the Zuniverse Project. His book The Crowd on the Cosmos is out now. For even more fascinating science, why not check out the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine? It's packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. In the December issue,

we find out why we are heading back to Venus, Earth's toxic twin, and ask what would happen if robots took our jobs. We also meet the physicists searching for a theory of everything. There is, of course, much more inside, but if you can't wait to get hold of a copy, then check out our many, many previous science focus podcast episodes. They are all well worth a listen, and we'd love to know what you think with a review or a comment.

Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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