It has been a while since I provided an update on how many classifications everyone is doing. We are approaching a significant milestone; to date 9,705 people have contributed to BashTheBug! It will be BashTheBug’s first birthday in a bit over a month on Saturday 7 April 2018, so hopefully our 10,000th person will join the project before then!
Overall you’ve done 677,620 classifications as of yesterday! I’ll keep a eye out for when we go over 750,000 classifications.
This is another great example of how volunteers spot things that we, the professional scientists, miss.
Before 2017 slips out of mind, here is a list of all the things that happened in our first year as it has whizzed by
This is a BashTheBug first; a poem about Citizen Science and The Zooniverse that mentions bug bashing!
Head over to Sam Illingworth’s site to check it out (and you can even listen to him read it out if you follow the link at the bottom of the page).
Last week, BashTheBug was invited to Google in London to celebrate winning the Community Award of the inaugural NIHR Let’s Get Digital competition. Myself and Helen Spiers went representing the BashTheBug community and gave a short talk about the work all the Citizen Scientists are doing to improve our understanding of antibiotic resistance in TB.
We reached 500,000 classifications sometime late on Thursday 16 November 2017 – a little over seven months after launch!
Thank you to all the volunteers who have given BashTheBug a go.
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.