Citizen science: OpenROV's David Lang enables armchair Jacques Cousteaus. By Rachel Botsman In the past it was up to famous explorers such as Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus to go on discovery expeditions. When they returned from voyages they would share tales of the new lands they had found. There were huge barriers – high costs for one, and enormous safety risks – that separated explorers from non-explorers. David Lang (pictured) and his co-founder, Eric Stackpole, want to give amateurs from all over the world an easy and affordable way to discover the mysterious life under the sea.
Today, there are more than 3000 ROV owners who use them to explore shipwrecks, find ancient Mayan pottery, spot elusive sea creatures and observe pollution from the comfort of their living rooms. On the surface, OpenROV looks like a cool underwater robotics company but in fact it’s part of something bigger: the citizen science movement. What is it about the water that you deeply connect with? I have a romantic attachment to the ocean. How did your journey start with OpenROV? CitSci.org - CitSci.org and CyberTracker Team Up to Advance Citizen Science. The year is 2001 and this is Central Africa. Reports are trickling in about an Ebola outbreak.
The outbreak is unanticipated. Data for tracking and predicting the spread of the outbreak are scarce. Lives are at stake. Enter CyberTracker. CyberTracker is a downloadable desktop software application developed to assist non-literate wild animal trackers collecting data about animal movements and behavior. CyberTracker patrol data showed presence of lowland gorilla before the outbreak and absence over a large area after the outbreak.
“One of the great features of CyberTracker software is that it was developed with an icon-based user interface that enables expert non-literate trackers to record complex geo-referenced observations on animal behaviour,” says Louis Liebenberg. “Unfortunately CyberTracker data are not yet available online. That ‘we’ is the team at Colorado State University’s CitSci.org. Photos courtesy of Louis Leibenburg. We May Be Able to Make Plastic Sustainable Using Pine Needle Waste. A team of scientists at the University of Bath in England is looking to pine trees to make the world’s plastic a little bit greener. As Seeker reports, the researchers have developed a way to swap the nonrenewable crude oil used in plastic production with a waste product derived from pine needles.
Pinene is the chemical compound that gives pine trees their unmistakable fragrance, and it’s also a common byproduct of the paper-making process. Instead of allowing the resource to go to waste, the University of Bath chemists lay out how it can be converted into a polymer in their paper published in the journal Polymer Chemistry [PDF]. Polylactic acids made from organic materials like corn or sugar are often mixed with caprolactone to create flexible plastics. While corn and sugar cane are renewable, the crude oil used to make caprolactone is not. By replacing caprolactone with the pinene-based polymer, the scientists say they’ve found a way to make plastic that’s sustainable.
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