Author: Philip Fowler

Last Friday, along with several other Zooniverse projects, BashTheBug was invited to the monthly Lates event of the Natural History Museum in London as part of a pop-up exhibition organised by ConSciCom.

A bit over six months since BashTheBug launched, and it is still attracting new Citizen Scientists – over 7,350 people have contributed to the project now – and the rate of classifications shows no sign of slowing. Each week the volunteers do 5,000 to 10,000 classifications and, as a result, the project has now done a shade over 431,000 classifications.

BashTheBug is six months old! To mark the event, I’ve written a longer article that appears on the Zooniverse blog which talks through in more detail the goals of our research and how you are all helping us.

You may have noticed the images recently have not had much bacterial growth on them, which, if I was doing lots of classifications, would be a bit boring and also difficult. That was because these were all taken after the M.tuberculosis had only been growing for a week.

BashTheBug was featured yesterday on ScienceUpdate, a one-minute daily briefing on interesting topics in science run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Click here to read the transcript or listen to the one minute feature.

Although I’ve posted before on how a small number of users do a lot of classifications and how BashTheBug follows the Pareto, or 80:20, principle, the only time we’ve looked at the top ten users was buried in a post not long after launch.

You can hear BashTheBug’s creator, Philip Fowler, briefly talk about BashTheBug how he got the idea of using Citizen Science to study antibiotic resistance and how the project has rapidly grown on BBC Radio Oxford by following this link (there are two different excerpts at 1 min 35 s and 1 hr 2 min 20 s). You may only be able to listen if you are in the UK and only until Tue 3 Oct 2017.

Our Citizen Science project has won the Online Community award in the NIHR Let’s Get Digital competition! This is no mean feat since there were 165 entries to the competition, and in total 2,251 votes were cast by the public.

In the six weeks since I last wrote a post with a statistics update, the Citizen Scientists have done 60,628 classifications bringing us up to 354,189. That means the project is still classifying around 10,000 images a week which is amazing given BashTheBug was launched back in April. If you recall, the images of the 96-well plates are taken after 7, 10, 14 and 21 days. Days 14 and 21 are complete for all drugs, and days 7 and 10 are complete for some of the antibiotics. The classifications are steadily mounting for the remaining 7 well antibiotics and by my reckoning we are about halfway to completing these too. Don’t worry; once this dataset is complete, I’ll upload another….