Science News

New research has analysed the mood of Twitter users in the UK and detected various changes in the mood of the public. In particular, the researchers observed a significant increase in negative mood, anger and fear, coinciding with the announcement of spending cuts and last summer's riots together with a possibly calming effect during the royal wedding.

Articles about PSYCHOLOGY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=psychology

To better protect people's health, Dr. Leslie Saxon wants to collect the heartbeat rhythm of every person in the world, and she is creating a website to do it. Called everyheartbeat, the site will allow anyone to upload their heart rate data, perhaps taken from the iPhone light, the AliveCor iPhone case, or any other sensor.

Using games and augmented reality, it's possible to control where people go in the real world. John Rula, a graduate student in engineering at northwestern University, and Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, came up with a way to get people to go places they might ordinarily not go. The concept is called "crowd soft control," and combines incentives with mobile applications to nudge people in a certain direction.

Computer science researchers at Northwestern University have developed a way to exert limited control on how people move, pushing them out of their regular travel patterns. The key: tapping into some of their cell phone applications.

The social network is soon to be filled with stars…not celebrities, but actual celestial bodies. The GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array (GLORIA) is a €2.5 million project (~$3.4M USD) that will, for the next three years, provide open access to research class robotic telescopes around the world. Spear-headed by Francisco Sanchez at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, GLORIA will eventually include 17 telescopes on 4 continents, gathering mountains of data that users can help analyze and discuss. Yet the project will be more than simply crowd-sourcing data crunching to the internet: through a system of social karma, participants in GLORIA will be able to actually direct the robotic telescopes and control where they look in the sky. By combining astronomy with Web 2.0, GLORIA aims to gather widespread interest from the internet, and perhaps even accelerate science with the power of the crowd.

The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.

CROWDSOURCING: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?q=crowdsourcing

A series of new apps allows parents to chart the development of their newborn baby by recording every diaper change, burp and sniffle. Taken together, this data may give parents a better view of how their child is progressing and what patterns emerge along the way.

Symcat combines aggregated data from patient records with demographics and user symptoms to inform diagnoses over the Internet.

Computer game crowdsources DNA sequence alignments across different species.