Citizen Science Time: Help Scientists by Sending Them Some Poop.. No Seriously

Stool Samples for Science: For Jack Gilbert’s next research project, he’ll be exploring a dark, mysterious place where thousands of unique species live, many of them unknown to science. He’ll be collecting samples of those species, cataloging them and trying to understand how they live.

Image: Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium species that lives in the human gut. A new project is looking for volunteers to donate stool, skin and mouth samples for a study about the bacteria that live in human intestines. Credit: USDA

He’s not heading out on an expedition to the seafloor, a deep cave or anywhere else to do it, however. The specimens will be coming to him, by mail, in the form of thousands of scrapings from people’s skin, mouths and stools.

“Of course it’s gross, but science and helping people is more important than our sensibilities,” Gilbert, who normally studies marine bacteria at the University of Chicago, told TechNewsDaily.

Want to send Gilbert a bit of you? Simply visit his study’s crowd-funding page and order a $99 kit to participate.

It’s a project whose time has come, says Lita Proctor, who coordinates the Human Mircobiome Project for the National Institutes of Health. She said DNA-analyzing technology — and social media — are finally ready to handle the task, which is being called the American Gut Project.

Ultimately, Gilbert and 28 other U.S. university researchers participating in the American Gut Project hope they can persuade 10,000 people to send scrapings. From those submissions, the researchers hope to learn more about how bacteria, health and diet are related. “How does the Atkins diet affect gut bacteria populations?” and “What bacteria do thinner people tend to have?” are the kinds of questions they should be able to answer, Gilbert said.

As long as they can gather enough volunteers, they plan to publish their first results sometime in 2014, he added.

Rare and Iconic Photos of Einstein Celebrate His Nobel Win 90 Years Ago

Ask anyone to name an iconic scientist and most people will say Albert Einstein. He was his generation’s greatest physicist as well as an international celebrity and humanitarian. Many people can tell you at least something about his renowned Theory of Relativity, though the details probably elude them right now.

Einstein’s fame extends to pop culture, where photos of the eminent scientist can be seen plastered on mugs, t-shirts, postcards, and internet memes. Though many images are well known — Einstein framed by his wild hair sticking his tongue out at the camera — there are still a good number that rarely see the light of day.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of Albert Einstein winning the Nobel Prize in physics, we are presenting a collection of photographs — some famous, some rare — that exemplify this singular man. The images come from the Bettmann Archive, a collection of more than 11 million historical photographs owned by Corbis Images.

Einstein actually received the 1921 Nobel physics prize but, because of the first World War, the announcement was delayed. He got the medal on Nov. 9, 1922 not for his Theory of Relativity, which was still controversial at the time, but for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect, which is the basis for modern solar power. Einstein wasn’t actually in Europe during the prize ceremony, he was away on a cross-country journey to lecture in Japan. His friend and fellow physicist Niels Bohr received the 1922 physics Nobel during the same ceremony and was upset that Einstein wouldn’t be there to attend the proceedings with him.

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