#experiment.com

Motivations to Blog about Science

Dr. Dave Ebert and his team at Moss Landing Marine Labs are discovering new species of sharks left and right!

Here is a fun trailer for the project I am working on for this summer! Experiment.com is like a science kickstarter, and myself and another paleontologist have a project for this summer that we are raising funds on Experiment for. The money we raise will be used for travel, research, and eventually open source publications that will not be restricted to just the scientific community, but open to everyone! We only have about a week left and are sitting about halfway to our goal, so please share or donate if you can- I’m excited to be part of an opportunity to not only do some awesome science this summer, but share it with everyone! Check the project out for more information-

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.

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.