Crowdsource

To boldly "go" where few people have gone before

Astronomy

NASA offering cash prizes for lunar toilet concepts

NASA's Artemis mission will (hopefully) take astronauts to the Moon in 2024 … and when those people get there, they'll need to go to the bathroom. With that in mind, the space agency is now looking to the public for ideas for "moon toilets."

A stunning picture of Naples as taken from the ISS (Image: ESA/NASA)

Astronomy

New crowdsourcing project calls on citizen scientists to catalog images of cities at night

A new crowdsourcing initiative is calling upon the public to help catalog the ever increasing library of stunning images snapped of our planet, and more importantly its cities, at night from the International Space Station (ISS).

In the game EteRNA, players are asked to solve puzzles that predict how RNA will fold once synthesized

Science

Gamers outshine computers in crowdsourced RNA modeling

Results from the crowdsourced game and experiment, EteRNA, which combines RNA folding puzzles with laboratory synthesis, show that human gamers are able to develop better models of RNA folding than previous computer algorithms. The game community also created novel folding rules.