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A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. eBird's goal is to maximize the utility and accessibility of the vast numbers of bird observations made each year by recreational and professional bird watchers. It is amassing one of the largest and fastest growing biodiversity data resources in existence.

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science. In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

In an effort to secure mass-collaboration, the company has launched a $7 million competition to reward talented minds for their potential contribution in perfecting the Personal Genome Machine sequencer that the company has developed. The machine relies on semi-conductor technology and has the capability of transforming chemical data into digital information. It is the first of its kind in the world and creative minds can enter the Grand Challenges Contest.

BOINC harnesses the idle time of participants' computers for a massive, crowdsourced version of distributed computing. This computing power is then marshaled for and made available for virtuous scientific necessities including global warming research, planet discovery, extraterrestrial study, and more. The entities and projects utilizing the BOINC platform to crowdsource their research include SETI, FightAIDS@home, the Collatz Conjecture project and more.

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy: Or, if you run several projects, try an account manager such as GridRepublic or BAM!.

The Great Sunflower Project targets bee and gardening enthusiasts to help research on a large scale what wild bees are doing and what effects there are on polination of garden plants, crops and wild plants.

DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) poses fundamental questions about systems biology, and invites participants to propose solutions. The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between theory and experiment, specifically in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building. DREAM challenges address how we can assess the quality of our descriptions of networks that underlie biological systems, and of our predictions of the outcomes of novel experiments. These are not simple questions. Researchers have used a variety of algorithms to deduce the structure of biological networks and/or to predict the outcome of perturbations to their systems. They have also evaluated the success of their methodologies using a diverse set of non-standardised metrics. What is still needed, and what DREAM aims to achieve, is a fair comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and a clear sense of the reliability of the models that researchers create.

distributed-computing projects in which volunteers download a small piece of software and let their home computers do some extracurricular work when the machines would otherwise be idle (after Nature article of Eric Hand)

The Open Dinosaur Project was founded to involve scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution. We have three major goals:1) do good science; 2) do this science in the most open way possible; and 3) allow anyone who is interested to participate. And by anyone, we mean anyone! We do not care about your education, geographic location, age, or previous background with paleontology. The only requirement for joining us is that you share the goals of our project and are willing to help out in the efforts.

Beginning in 2006, NASA's Stardust@home citizen science project allows anyone with Internet access to help in the search for the first samples of solid matter from outside the solar system. To learn more, including how to participate, please click on the About tab above or on any of the links below under "More Information." Then join the search by following the Get Started steps found to the left of this page; or after registering, read the latest Stardust@home news in our blog below. We look forwarded to working with you on this exciting research!

Beginning in 2006, NASA's Stardust@home citizen science project allows anyone with Internet access to help in the search for the first samples of solid matter from outside the solar system. To learn more, including how to participate, please click on the About tab above or on any of the links below under "More Information."

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data

Bossa is an open-source software framework for distributed thinking - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that use human cognition, knowledge, or intelligence. Bossa minimizes the effort of creating and operating a distributed thinking project.

In occasion of the Haiti earthquake an European Commission's Joint Research Center team used the damage reports mapped on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform to show that this crowdsourced data can help predict the spatial distribution of structural damage in Port-au-Prince

A few days ago, the Guardian ran a Q&A session with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Cox and Forshaw are professors of physics at the University of Manchester, both involved in research with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. Cox is of course well known for his wonderful media exploits on the BBC.

a blog reporting daily findings from the lab