experiment

This post is part of a series of Q&A’s with scientists who are crowdfunding their research on Experiment. Check out Daniel Helman’s project and many others at Experiment.com.

Tell us more about how we can use lightning for energy and material use. How does it work? What does the literature currently say about this as a realistic possibility?

Thanks for the question. Obviously, it’s not been done yet. There are a few different strategies that might work, for example, guiding lightning to strike inside a chamber filled with water, and using the steam to turn a turbine set up in an escape tunnel. There’s nothing in the scientific literature on this yet. In 2011, I wrote an article about harnessing lightning for electrical power, with the idea being to use inductors — placed close, but not too close — to harness only part of the energy. Using inductors or capacitors can be expensive compared to the power output, perhaps too expensive. For artificial lightning, it may be possible to incorporate ball lightning into a fusion reactor that won’t need magnetic containment, and will therefore be cheap enough to produce electricity widescale.

To jump back to possibilities: The practice of using rockets with a wire attached to induce a strike is well-documented and has been used successfully since the 1960s. A high tower would also work, and there are articles detailing tower strikes. What I’m doing is putting together a special topic journal issue for other scientists, so that they can submit their latest work in a venue specifically set up for the practical uses of lightning. In short, it’s an open question, and one that might be worthwhile to research.

There are a lot of critics that say that harnessing lightning for power isn’t possible. How do you respond to them?

I usually try and find out where their objection is, and then address that specifically. For example, if a person is looking at the cost of using capacitors to store the charge from a lightning discharge, they are likely correct in assuming that the economics might not work. But then I’ve been in touch with scientists who work in supercapacitors, and they are interested in the possibility of using them to harness power from lightning. That tells me the economics may not always be unfavorable. Note that what I’ve described is for a single method of harnessing lightning for power. There are other potential methods. And there is other work that has been done suggesting the possibility of using lightning not for power, but for materials processing. Asbestos, for example, can be made inert through melting by an arc of plasma. Lightning might take the place of the laboratory-generated arc.

There are a few other objections I’ve encountered. Lightning strikes aren’t that common in many places. To that, I definitely agree! If harnessing power from lightning is to be a possibility, then a power plant ought to be sited in a place that gets a lot of lightning. The same with another objection, that each strike doesn’t carry enough energy to make harnessing it profitable. Maybe. It depends on where you are sited, and what process you are using to harness the power, assuming that you have a strategy that might work. And there may not be anything that will work. I really don’t know. But I do like the idea of researching the possibility. The scientific method is a strong tool for examining unknowns. It is important for there be experimentation, so that objections can be proven or disproven.

What are you hoping to accomplish with the money you raise on Experiment?

I’m working on a special topic issue. The journal itself, The Open Renewable Energy Journal is open-access, as its name implies, and has been around for a few years. I’ve been able to have all the publication fees that the journal normally charges waived for the special topic issue. The money raised here will support the work on my end, basically editorial work, and then also be used to generate press after the article comes out. If there is interest, I’d like to help set up a professional organization related to the practical applications of lightning, and that should include a journal and conferences. That’s a ways off.

Why is this project important?

The planetary electrical system includes the electrical charge associated with thunderstorms, and lightning discharge is a part of that. If this energy can be harnessed, it will provide another alternative source of electrical power or power for materials’ processing. The need is obvious. Anything that might be an alternative to fossil fuels might provide more time before the polar ice melts. After that happens, it’s anyone’s guess what the climate will do.

Weather circulation systems on the planet are made up of three cells in the northern and southern hemispheres, one at the equator, the Hadley cell, one at the mid-latitudes, the Ferrel cell, and one at the poles. The Hadley and polar weather cells are stable, and the Ferrel cell isn’t. It reacts to what the other two do. But if the ice melts completely from the poles, then the polar cell probably won’t have the same stability that it does now. If the polar weather cells are disrupted, then global weather will be disrupted, and that will disrupt agriculture. And if agriculture is disrupted, then there’s not much hope for living in cities. It means the possible end of civilization. That’s the worst case scenario, and it may happen if the polar ice melts away completely. Agriculture depends on the weather.

To jump back, alternative energy, such as what may be feasible from lightning, can offset energy from fossil fuels. If fossil fuel combustion is replaced by renewable energy, climate instability should be less likely. Let me be clear, though, that this project is simply to publish the latest research on the area. The way that technology works is that a business decides that they can make a profit with a technology, and then they spend money to develop a product. The primary research comes first.

But it’s a real possibility. I’ve been successful in introducing a few research groups to each other, and that may bear fruit in the future. It’s been really fun to be in the position of scientific matchmaker, as it were. A lot depends on the research itself, if people are successful in their work.

Why did you choose crowdfunding for this project?

I like how the future is shaping up. There have never been more possibilities for independent science work. I’m an independent scientist. The institute I belong to is a virtual institute, designed for independent scientists. I think it’s a perfect fit. Crowdfunding works well in this setting, especially with more modest funding goals or with projects that might not be popular yet in the mainstream scientific community. But, really, I like the traditional grant structure as well. I think there’s room for both.

Is this a project Nikola Tesla would be proud of?

It’s hard to know. The most creative scientists can sometimes have hunches they are following up, and their interests may lie in one area and not another. Tesla experimented in atmospheric electricity, and also in artificial rainfall with electricity. I don’t think either of those projects were as successful as some of his other inventions, such as the electric motor, three-phase transmission of electricity, and, oh, just so many things. I imagine if he were alive today, I would have contacted him already to see if he had an article to submit to the special topic issue.

This post is part of a series of Q&A’s with scientists who are crowdfunding their research on Experiment. Check out Daniel Helman’s project and many others at Experiment.com.

Tell us more about how we can use lightning for energy and material use. How does it work? What does the literature currently say about this as a realistic possibility?

Thanks for the question. Obviously, it’s not been done yet. There are a few different strategies that might work, for example, guiding lightning to strike inside a chamber filled with water, and using the steam to turn a turbine set up in an escape tunnel. There’s nothing in the scientific literature on this yet. In 2011, I wrote an article about harnessing lightning for electrical power, with the idea being to use inductors — placed close, but not too close — to harness only part of the energy. Using inductors or capacitors can be expensive compared to the power output, perhaps too expensive. For artificial lightning, it may be possible to incorporate ball lightning into a fusion reactor that won’t need magnetic containment, and will therefore be cheap enough to produce electricity widescale.

To jump back to possibilities: The practice of using rockets with a wire attached to induce a strike is well-documented and has been used successfully since the 1960s. A high tower would also work, and there are articles detailing tower strikes. What I’m doing is putting together a special topic journal issue for other scientists, so that they can submit their latest work in a venue specifically set up for the practical uses of lightning. In short, it’s an open question, and one that might be worthwhile to research.

There are a lot of critics that say that harnessing lightning for power isn’t possible. How do you respond to them?

I usually try and find out where their objection is, and then address that specifically. For example, if a person is looking at the cost of using capacitors to store the charge from a lightning discharge, they are likely correct in assuming that the economics might not work. But then I’ve been in touch with scientists who work in supercapacitors, and they are interested in the possibility of using them to harness power from lightning. That tells me the economics may not always be unfavorable. Note that what I’ve described is for a single method of harnessing lightning for power. There are other potential methods. And there is other work that has been done suggesting the possibility of using lightning not for power, but for materials processing. Asbestos, for example, can be made inert through melting by an arc of plasma. Lightning might take the place of the laboratory-generated arc.

There are a few other objections I’ve encountered. Lightning strikes aren’t that common in many places. To that, I definitely agree! If harnessing power from lightning is to be a possibility, then a power plant ought to be sited in a place that gets a lot of lightning. The same with another objection, that each strike doesn’t carry enough energy to make harnessing it profitable. Maybe. It depends on where you are sited, and what process you are using to harness the power, assuming that you have a strategy that might work. And there may not be anything that will work. I really don’t know. But I do like the idea of researching the possibility. The scientific method is a strong tool for examining unknowns. It is important for there be experimentation, so that objections can be proven or disproven.

What are you hoping to accomplish with the money you raise on Experiment?

I’m working on a special topic issue. The journal itself, The Open Renewable Energy Journal is open-access, as its name implies, and has been around for a few years. I’ve been able to have all the publication fees that the journal normally charges waived for the special topic issue. The money raised here will support the work on my end, basically editorial work, and then also be used to generate press after the article comes out. If there is interest, I’d like to help set up a professional organization related to the practical applications of lightning, and that should include a journal and conferences. That’s a ways off.

Why is this project important?

The planetary electrical system includes the electrical charge associated with thunderstorms, and lightning discharge is a part of that. If this energy can be harnessed, it will provide another alternative source of electrical power or power for materials’ processing. The need is obvious. Anything that might be an alternative to fossil fuels might provide more time before the polar ice melts. After that happens, it’s anyone’s guess what the climate will do.

Weather circulation systems on the planet are made up of three cells in the northern and southern hemispheres, one at the equator, the Hadley cell, one at the mid-latitudes, the Ferrel cell, and one at the poles. The Hadley and polar weather cells are stable, and the Ferrel cell isn’t. It reacts to what the other two do. But if the ice melts completely from the poles, then the polar cell probably won’t have the same stability that it does now. If the polar weather cells are disrupted, then global weather will be disrupted, and that will disrupt agriculture. And if agriculture is disrupted, then there’s not much hope for living in cities. It means the possible end of civilization. That’s the worst case scenario, and it may happen if the polar ice melts away completely. Agriculture depends on the weather.

To jump back, alternative energy, such as what may be feasible from lightning, can offset energy from fossil fuels. If fossil fuel combustion is replaced by renewable energy, climate instability should be less likely. Let me be clear, though, that this project is simply to publish the latest research on the area. The way that technology works is that a business decides that they can make a profit with a technology, and then they spend money to develop a product. The primary research comes first.

But it’s a real possibility. I’ve been successful in introducing a few research groups to each other, and that may bear fruit in the future. It’s been really fun to be in the position of scientific matchmaker, as it were. A lot depends on the research itself, if people are successful in their work.

Why did you choose crowdfunding for this project?

I like how the future is shaping up. There have never been more possibilities for independent science work. I’m an independent scientist. The institute I belong to is a virtual institute, designed for independent scientists. I think it’s a perfect fit. Crowdfunding works well in this setting, especially with more modest funding goals or with projects that might not be popular yet in the mainstream scientific community. But, really, I like the traditional grant structure as well. I think there’s room for both.

Is this a project Nikola Tesla would be proud of?

It’s hard to know. The most creative scientists can sometimes have hunches they are following up, and their interests may lie in one area and not another. Tesla experimented in atmospheric electricity, and also in artificial rainfall with electricity. I don’t think either of those projects were as successful as some of his other inventions, such as the electric motor, three-phase transmission of electricity, and, oh, just so many things. I imagine if he were alive today, I would have contacted him already to see if he had an article to submit to the special topic issue.

Tell us more about how we can use lightning for energy and material use. How does it work? What does the literature currently say about this as a realistic possibility?

Thanks for the question. Obviously, it’s not been done yet. There are a few different strategies that might work, for example, guiding lightning to strike inside a chamber filled with water, and using the steam to turn a turbine set up in an escape tunnel. There’s nothing in the scientific literature on this yet. In 2011, I wrote an article about harnessing lightning for electrical power, with the idea being to use inductors — placed close, but not too close — to harness only part of the energy. Using inductors or capacitors can be expensive compared to the power output, perhaps too expensive. For artificial lightning, it may be possible to incorporate ball lightning into a fusion reactor that won’t need magnetic containment, and will therefore be cheap enough to produce electricity widescale.

To jump back to possibilities: The practice of using rockets with a wire attached to induce a strike is well-documented and has been used successfully since the 1960s. A high tower would also work, and there are articles detailing tower strikes. What I’m doing is putting together a special topic journal issue for other scientists, so that they can submit their latest work in a venue specifically set up for the practical uses of lightning. In short, it’s an open question, and one that might be worthwhile to research.

There are a lot of critics that say that harnessing lightning for power isn’t possible. How do you respond to them?

I usually try and find out where their objection is, and then address that specifically. For example, if a person is looking at the cost of using capacitors to store the charge from a lightning discharge, they are likely correct in assuming that the economics might not work. But then I’ve been in touch with scientists who work in supercapacitors, and they are interested in the possibility of using them to harness power from lightning. That tells me the economics may not always be unfavorable. Note that what I’ve described is for a single method of harnessing lightning for power. There are other potential methods. And there is other work that has been done suggesting the possibility of using lightning not for power, but for materials processing. Asbestos, for example, can be made inert through melting by an arc of plasma. Lightning might take the place of the laboratory-generated arc.

There are a few other objections I’ve encountered. Lightning strikes aren’t that common in many places. To that, I definitely agree! If harnessing power from lightning is to be a possibility, then a power plant ought to be sited in a place that gets a lot of lightning. The same with another objection, that each strike doesn’t carry enough energy to make harnessing it profitable. Maybe. It depends on where you are sited, and what process you are using to harness the power, assuming that you have a strategy that might work. And there may not be anything that will work. I really don’t know. But I do like the idea of researching the possibility. The scientific method is a strong tool for examining unknowns. It is important for there be experimentation, so that objections can be proven or disproven.

What are you hoping to accomplish with the money you raise on Experiment?

I’m working on a special topic issue. The journal itself, The Open Renewable Energy Journal is open-access, as its name implies, and has been around for a few years. I’ve been able to have all the publication fees that the journal normally charges waived for the special topic issue. The money raised here will support the work on my end, basically editorial work, and then also be used to generate press after the article comes out. If there is interest, I’d like to help set up a professional organization related to the practical applications of lightning, and that should include a journal and conferences. That’s a ways off.

Why is this project important?

The planetary electrical system includes the electrical charge associated with thunderstorms, and lightning discharge is a part of that. If this energy can be harnessed, it will provide another alternative source of electrical power or power for materials’ processing. The need is obvious. Anything that might be an alternative to fossil fuels might provide more time before the polar ice melts. After that happens, it’s anyone’s guess what the climate will do.

Weather circulation systems on the planet are made up of three cells in the northern and southern hemispheres, one at the equator, the Hadley cell, one at the mid-latitudes, the Ferrel cell, and one at the poles. The Hadley and polar weather cells are stable, and the Ferrel cell isn’t. It reacts to what the other two do. But if the ice melts completely from the poles, then the polar cell probably won’t have the same stability that it does now. If the polar weather cells are disrupted, then global weather will be disrupted, and that will disrupt agriculture. And if agriculture is disrupted, then there’s not much hope for living in cities. It means the possible end of civilization. That’s the worst case scenario, and it may happen if the polar ice melts away completely. Agriculture depends on the weather.

To jump back, alternative energy, such as what may be feasible from lightning, can offset energy from fossil fuels. If fossil fuel combustion is replaced by renewable energy, climate instability should be less likely. Let me be clear, though, that this project is simply to publish the latest research on the area. The way that technology works is that a business decides that they can make a profit with a technology, and then they spend money to develop a product. The primary research comes first.

But it’s a real possibility. I’ve been successful in introducing a few research groups to each other, and that may bear fruit in the future. It’s been really fun to be in the position of scientific matchmaker, as it were. A lot depends on the research itself, if people are successful in their work.

Why did you choose crowdfunding for this project?

I like how the future is shaping up. There have never been more possibilities for independent science work. I’m an independent scientist. The institute I belong to is a virtual institute, designed for independent scientists. I think it’s a perfect fit. Crowdfunding works well in this setting, especially with more modest funding goals or with projects that might not be popular yet in the mainstream scientific community. But, really, I like the traditional grant structure as well. I think there’s room for both.

Is this a project Nikola Tesla would be proud of?

It's gift giving season once again. Working in the ethics and compliance industry means heightened awareness of company gift policies, value of vendor gifts, and whether any of that can be mis-construed as bribery and the like. But for many of us in the corporate world, that also means tokens of appreciation for teammates and colleagues in the office. As the team lead I've always tried to be creative about tokens of appreciation. One year it was Kiva credits to raise awareness that for as little as $25, you can make a huge impact to an entrepreneur halfway across the world. Another year it was a Space Pen. As an avid space fan, I wanted to share my passion for space without putting everyone on a rocket.

So this year, I had some bigger goals. There were three things I wanted to accomplish: 

1. Get to Know Each Other: we just merged two companies and two teams, so getting to know each other's interests and passions was important.

2. Get Involved: we're all geeks at some level and should be involved in things that aren't just our day-job.

3. Experiment: explore, try, widen your view - think about how to help others explore.

With these goals, what came to mind immediately was Experiment.com. Having backed other projects before, and seeing the wide range of questions scientists (of all types) are trying to answer, I knew this was it! 

So what was the "gift"?

I chose to expose my team to Experiment.com (and none of them were aware of it before) by asking each of them to find a project, fund it, and share with the rest of the team what they chose and why it was of interest. In return, I would provide a gift card of the same amount to them.

The result?

The team had a blast. They thought it was creative, they loved exploring Experiment.com and they shared their interests with each other. Interests ranged from lung development in premature babies to next-gen rovers for Mars to the impact of stress on memory loss. We're hopeful that these projects will successfully yield answers to continue momentum for their respective scientists.

I'm sure I'll repeat this next year, but that in-between, our team will find time to continue to explore their passions and get involved.

--

This guest post was written by Jimmy Lin who backed his first project in January 2015.

We’re excited to share that Kate Ray is joining the Experiment team. Kate is an engineer who will be helping us build more science.

1. Tell us about your background!

In college I studied journalism and cognitive psychology, decided I wanted to be a science journalist, and made a documentary about the Semantic Web. I ended up learning programming and started a company with a friend. For four years we worked on tools to help more people make the web, and then continued that work at WordPress when we were acquired by Automattic. I’m coming to Experiment with years of experience building tools for creative people, and a strong belief in the power of individuals who become a crowd.

2. What are you looking forward to?

Digging up a triceratops! Jk, we totally did that this summer. Maybe hanging out with some lemurs. Oh, nm. Ummm…Mars? We’ll get there.

3. What do you love about Experiment?

The scientists I’ve met. They are passionate and obsessive and so dedicated, I just want their enthusiasm to rub off on me. I love that we get to build tools for them, and for other people who are curious enough to seek science outside of their day jobs.

4. Why do you think Experiment is important right now?

The World Wide Web was invented by a scientist about 25 years ago in a physics lab. It kicked off a tech industry that became incredibly prosperous, while funding for science in America plunged (NIH’s funding decreased by 20% since 2004, NSF by 9% since 2012). Grants are more competitive and fewer risky experiments get funded. I want there to be a place in our society for new and independent and more of every kind of science, and I believe enough people also want it that we can find each other on the web and make it happen.

5. What is your biggest science inspiration?

My dad :)

I used to ask him “Why?” all the time, like a lot of kids, and he was a good scientist and dad so he would try to answer.

Why is the sky blue? Because molecules in the air scatter blue light more than other colors.

Why? Because light travels in waves, and blue has a shorter wavelength.

How short is it? I don’t know, let’s go look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

And then he’d push my questions further: This is how we describe color in physics. But how do you know that the blue you’re seeing is the same thing as what I see? (I tripped out over that for many years. My sixth grade science fair project was on color perception.)

Hello friends,

We've just unrolled a bunch of new updates that we’re happy to share.

The first and most important one is that after hearing back from lots of researchers, we’ve improved the performance of our lab note creator. Researchers and project creators who were experiencing trouble with the lab note editor will find that it’s much more reliable now. We’ve taken care of some of the most common errors in the backend, and we’ll be closely monitoring for any other new errors that pop up. We know how important it is to be able to upload images quickly, so we’ll be continuing to pay attention to this.

As well, we’ve rolled out a new update to our aggregated lab notes page. We've reskinned it and added new featured labnotes that will be hand picked by us, to showcase the best science on the site. As well, if you’ve backed projects then you’ll be able to see updates from your projects there. This page will likely be changing and improving more in the future, so we’d love to hear from people what can be improved.

Lastly, we’ve improved our researcher guide in a few new ways. First, we’ve added a project introduction right before creating a project. Our hope is that this will help introduce important concepts before diving into creating a project. As well, we’ve improved the section of our guide on how to produce a project video, with storyboards and useful examples.

Introducing Sergey Varaksin!

Sergey is joining Experiment as an engineer. Sergey likes skateboarding and cat shirts. His favorite ruby method is inspect. 

Hey everyone, I’m very excited to share that we’ve just added functional DOIs on Experiment. We’ve now officially issued DOIs to all funded projects on Experiment as they move forward to document their progress and share their results

Digital Object Identifiers are used by scientists to cite and reference other produced work. Also, they carry with them relevant metadata about the authors, topic area, content type, and much more. 

This means funded Experiment projects and their related scientific content are now fully citeable. As our system grows, we’ll additionally grow the metadata as our community’s content becomes richer and more diverse. 

We’re pretty excited to be joining the over 5,000 assignees who’ve contributed over 114 million DOI names. 

One frequent question we often receive from researchers is the concern of getting scooped. Typically people who ask this question are startups, university researchers, or folks working in fields like life sciences or engineering. Because this question gets asked so often, we wanted to dedicated a longer explanation to answer this.

Experiment works because of storytelling. It’s what drives curious backers, and it’s the reward for seeing a project through. Plenty of successful projects have had sensitive data or information yet still manage to tell a great story without putting their results at risk.

Our most important policy is that the project investigators are in charge of what information or data they choose to disclose. So, this means you get to decide what you’d like to share.

If you're unsure or what you’re allowed to share, just ask your journal (if you intend to publish) or your university (if there are questions about IP ownership). There will usually be someone who can provide an official or legal perspective for your research setting.

Another way to think about it is that at the end of the day, your backers might not actually care about the keystone or significant data. In fact, your backers will want what's best for the project to ensure that the research results remains impactful. That means if by disclosing representative data or findings that you won't be able to publish the results, then that's not best way to show evidence of impact and complete the story. There are plenty of other ways to show evidence of the project’s impact, such as by sharing representative, deidentified, or even negative data.

Experiment Happy Hour at the 2015 American Elasmobranch Society Conference in Reno, Nevada.

Hey backers, you raised $6,775 for a dinosaur dig led by Jason Schein and the Bighorn Basin Dinosaur Project.

We drove out to Wyoming to spend some time in the field with Jason and his team. We found a Triceratops!

Check out the story on Exposure!

One of our core values as an organization is transparency, so starting now we’ll be publicly sharing the monthly updates that we send out to our company investors, advisers, and supporters. It’s a regular snapshot on the health and growth of Experiment. 

A very brief update for the past two months. These were our two biggest months yet, with positive growth in new backers, pledge volume, and traffic.

Key Metrics:

- 346 total funded projects, $3.5M in total volume, $144k in June

- +21% traffic growth (april: 65k sessions, may: 87k, june: 92k)

- set new monthly high scores for revenue, projects funded, payments, payment volume, funding success rate, new users, and comments

- 46% project success rate

Good:

- currently rolling out a major release of a new design for project pages, increasing page performance by 5X with new backend

- ran a matching campaign meta-experiment that brought in $60.2k in one day

- conducted a survey to find that to date funded experiments have resulted in 18 peer-reviewed journal articles, 39 academic posters, and 52 talks at conferences

- added persistent and citeable DOI's for all experiment pages

Bad:

- universities are trying to come after us for using their logos

This Friday!

- we are hosting an emoji party to celebrate our recent $2M milestone, all in the area are invited! it is highly encouraged you wear an emoji costume.

Today we're excited to be introducing some new layout changes to the Experiment project pages.

We're rolling out the new project page design starting today. One new feature is a list of backers visible high up in the project's header. Backers are an integral part of each successful experiment, and our goal is to create a direct connection when you back a project. We're pretty excited about this new concept, and we've got lots in store in coming weeks to make this better.

Another major aspect of this new push is to introduce great performance improvements. One of the biggest points of feedback we heard from researchers out in the field or through mobile was site speed. With this new project page, we've increased page performance by 5X. We hope that this makes the site speedier and more enjoyable to use.

The biggest thing about this change is that it allows us to start introducing new features on the project page in a more modular way. With this new design, our goal is to add more interactive project sections to help convey the story behind the project while keeping it simple and easy to use. We've got lots of very exciting new features planned for this new layout, so stay tuned!

This week, robots! Check out our staff picks of currently fundraising projects, featuring little robots that help us do science.

Featured Experiments:

Using high-tech toys to improve foraging in captive rhinos

45% FUNDED ● BIOLOGY

Animal behavior is a rich area of study, but one where technology hasn't yet been introduced. So what happens when you take a high-tech gadget originally designed for house pets, and scale it up for a 3000-pound rhino named Boone? Backers will get an up close look at the science driving the project, or you can check out Boone's personal twitter. Also watch our recent video from our visit with Boone!

Mapping Salmon Spawning Sites with UAVs

34% FUNDED ● ECOLOGY

Salmon in the Pacific Northwest are hard to track when they return to spawn in small, often inaccessible creeks. This team from the University of Washington is developing quadcopter drones with cameras to survey remote spots, above the creeks and below the canopy, to generate better population data for land management and habitat restoration. They promise to share methods, data, and recommendations for doing this at home yourself.

Using aphids to measure electrical outputs in ferns

40% FUNDED ● BIOLOGY

OK, fine, aphids technically aren't robots, but they are small and this researcher is attaching tiny electrodes to aphids. Not much is known about long distance electrical signals in plants, but thanks to the previously successful Azolla Genome Project funded by 123 backers on Experiment, this project will combine physiological measurements with the new genetic data to find the basis for plant signaling.

Measurement of Atmospheric Pollution Profiles using Drones

65% FUNDED ● EARTH SCIENCE

We visited the San Francisco Zoo to hang out with the research team using smart toys to study Black Rhino behavior.

“I traversed the San Andreas fault off California, if you go off shore you can actually see the fault. Through the submarine we flew down between the two walls. It;s kind of you know, you get up these thermal vents and it's pumping out black smoke, all the chemicals are precipitating out. It's just like a chimney fire, it's pumping out, and all these shrimp are living right on the fringe. If they go just a little bit, and they're burned and dead. You see all this life living around the thermal vents.

Years ago, I found a new plant that nobody knew existed in freshwater in Yellowstone. And I also collected some samples from Yellowstone and gave them to the park service and found out that they had more life in the Nanoarchea range. They found more new life in those samples, than anybody had found anywhere in the world to date. We typically find new species of corals and fish that nobody knows about. Almost on every expedition we find something. We went out and found John F. Kennedy's PT boat, PT-109, out in the Solomon Islands.

I'm trying to get back out to Indonesia in 2018, I think there's a good chance we might. Indonesia is in the 'Coral Triangle'. There are places that the Indonesian government has never let anybody in. That's why I want to go.

There are two types of science, hypothesis driven science and exploration science. After so long in the institution model of doing research, I decided I had enough of skewed hypothesis chasing and embargoes on data for 3 years. With what we do, because it's publicly funded, all of the data is immediately available and accessible.”