How does technology turn science into a hobby?
How does technology turn science into a hobby?
By Kevin Dickinson | Published: 2024-11-17 16:00:00 | Source: The Present – Big Think
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When my son was in third grade, we joined the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Number of birds in the backyard. A form of community science — research in which volunteers collect or analyze data — this event involves hundreds of families observing and recording the birds they see in their neighborhoods. It is a simple but effective way for researchers to collect a robust database of bird populations across the United States. Meanwhile, volunteers enjoy a fun way to connect with science and the natural world.
That year’s count also happened to be a great one in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when we were closer to the birds than anyone else in the city. Over time, my family started raising birds. truly In it. My son made birds the focus of his science fair project. We took long walks to watch the winter season Barrow’s golden eyes And the spring nests of great blue herons. And I read books on everything from native species to the evolutionary history of feathers.
Since then, life has accelerated after the pandemic lull. My workload has become more demanding, and my son lives the fast and furious lifestyle of a socially active middle schooler. Time spent on family hobbies is fleeting, let alone scheduling this time around community science events.
In an effort to reclaim some of that time, I started looking for new ways we could engage with old hobbies when I noticed an interesting trend: Scientists and innovative creators were using consumer technologies to not only help people have cool hobbies but to seamlessly connect them with real scientific research. Fortunately, one of these projects, called Haikubox, spoke directly to my family’s love of birds.
Bird box
Haikubox is the brainchild of David Mann, an expert in bioacoustics who taught at the University of South Florida where he studied the aquatic vocalizations of fish and other marine life.
In 2019, he was contacted by Holger Klinka director at Cornell Lab, is looking to create a consumer bioacoustics product that mirrors the passive acoustic monitoring (or PAM) that scientists use to research biodiversity and animal behaviors. Mann built a prototype using… Raspberry Pi A single-board computer and I worked with a graduate student in Germany to code an AI neural network that identifies bird calls. And with that, Haikubox was hatched.
“Data, science, and the desire to know how the world is and use sound to do that. That’s the motivation behind everything we do,” Mann tells Freethink.
Here’s how it works: Once set up outside, the Haikubox uses a microphone to listen for bird calls in the area. Every chirp, chant, chirp, and cry is recorded as a spectrogram. That image is then analyzed by artificial intelligence, which has been trained to recognize specific patterns in sound waves. Once the AI makes the match, an entry is generated and uploaded to the app. Over time, users create a catalog of all the birds that have visited their neighborhood, and with each entry, they can also identify the species, listen to a recorded bird call, and explore where other users are hearing the bird across the network.
Mann and Amy Donner, business developers at Haikubox, provided my family with Haikubox to try out, and we appreciated starting our days with a survey of yesterday’s bird visitors. Most mornings, we’re greeted by the usual suspects: Dark-eyed JunkoSteller’s birds, Anna’s hummingbirds, and enough black-capped chickadees to star in a rip-off straight out of Hitchcock.
But we were also pleasantly surprised by many unexpected visitors that we would have otherwise missed. American migratory goldfinch. Rare pileated woodpecker. A barred screech owl (we later learned had moved into the woods behind our apartment). Even with our busy schedules, we can learn about our environment in the time it takes to taste our first cup of coffee.
“We lived in Florida for 20 years. There were birds that were picked that I didn’t even know existed,” Mann says. “It changed the way we interacted even when we went for walks with our dogs. We were listening the whole time and looking in the trees for what was there.”
Each recorded call also goes to a cloud database for future scientific research. To date, Mann and his team have collected more than 800 million recordings across the United States.
They also use the data to conduct their own research. Collaboration with researchers at Cornell Laboratory K. Lisa Young Center for Bioacoustic ConservationThey analyzed Haikubox data captured during the April 2024 solar eclipse to see how the total path affected the birds’ activity and sounds. As of our interview, they were submitting their findings to scientific journals for consideration.
“It’s exhilarating, the birds,” Donner says. “It’s not political. It’s very different from a lot of other things that happen in the world. People can have unified conversations about birds and their birds.”
Advancement of knowledge
But birding is not the only hobby that connects social sciences. It seems that with a little creativity and ingenuity, any hobby can contribute to this, including video games.
In 2020, Online multiplayer sciencean initiative to link video games with research, in collaboration with Gearbox Software, McGill Universityand Microcita Initiative To create a video game. More specifically, there is a little game called Border Sciencesaccessible through the gearbox Border areas 3.
The game was a puzzle game in the vein of a puzzle game Tetris. You know the type: colored blocks must match, lines must disappear, and high scores must go up. Classic stuff. All the science happened under the graphic cover. By simply playing the game, players helped fix common errors in genetic sequence data.
You see, when researchers Sequenced genomesthey typically decode small parts individually before putting them back together again. However, this method It can display errors. What technology is used, how replicated the genome is, and the identification of imprecise variants all affect the data. When the pieces are put back together, the nucleotide bases of the genome — such as the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts of DNA — can be accidentally replaced, deleted, or even overlapped.
Border Sciences The researchers took a dataset of 953,000 ribosomal RNA (rRNA) fragments from non-human gut microbes (each approximately 150 nucleotides long) and turned small fragments of these genomic sequences into collective puzzles. As players played the game — by moving colored blocks to remove spaces and arranging specific groups — they also removed errors from this data set. The AI then compares multiple players’ solutions to each puzzle and extracts optimal solutions, which allowed researchers to align sequences more precisely.
“Alliances are always a bit messy because they involve information that comes from millions of years of evolution.” McGill researchers “But it seems that the information we get from players has the potential to improve these alliances.”
And players never feel like they are doing tedious data management work. They had fun playing a game, and they got some in-game currency for it Border areas 3 As a reward.
In a 2024 Detailed results sheetThe researchers noted that more than 4 million players played Border Sciences It has helped solve more than 135 million sequencing problems. Their solutions will help scientists access better data, which in turn will help them understand the evolutionary history of these microbes as well as how they affect people’s health.
“We spend billions of hours playing video games every week. With the largest online game – World of Warcraft “People have spent more than 6 million years,” MMOS wrote on its website. “Diverting a small portion of that time would be a powerhouse for scientific research.”
It takes a village
If birds and video games don’t speak to you, that’s okay. These are just two examples that inspired me, but there they are Growing brotherhood From tinkerers, DIYers, and enthusiasts who find transformative ways to use hobbies to improve the world in small but impactful ways. They found ways to integrate community science with it Walking tour, astronomyand Health and wellness. For some, community science He is Hobby.
The thing about hobbyists is that they are always looking for ways to attract new fans. All you have to do is discover what interests you and connect with someone.
As Donner says, “Lifelong learning, you can’t give that up. You’re never too old to learn something new or make something or give back. This is a very easy way to do it.”
this condition Originally published by our sister site Freethink.
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