The first fortnight

Another amazing week. Together the Zooniverse citizen scientists did 28,721 classifications this week, bringing the grand total to 108,833. This is 19% of the way towards classifying all the subjects currently loaded (and in reality we are a bit over a third – 36% – of the way towards being able to do some very interesting analysis). Last week 444 people tried BashTheBug for the first time, bringing the total number of volunteers to 1,578 since launch, and including the beta-testers, 2,557. Again, there are two volunteers who have done an astonishing number of classifications: 2,360 and 2,339. Thank you everyone for all your work and please keep it up!

I’ve been following the talk boards and was amazed by this post earlier in the week.

This is an example of one of the subjects mentioned:

Notice the dot in well 4 and the small horizontal line in well 5. Remember that the wells are about 5mm across, so the horizontal line in the images is tiny, but as @GeodesicDegree noticed, can be seen in multiple images. A quick investigation of the images mentioned showed that they were all done by one person in one of the labs at the start of the year. This is an repeated artefact we certainly had not spotted and it looks like there may have been a problem with how that lab inoculates the plates.  We are currently investigating. This is an fantastic example of how citizen science can spot things that professional scientists otherwise miss.