This episode is presented by eBay.

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sellers.

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the week of March 26th, 2009.

I'm Steve Murski. This week on the podcast, we'll talk to astronomer Kevin Schwinsky about a galactic opportunity for you, and we'll go on a quick tour of a new very green building on the Yale campus.

Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news.

I spent March 24th on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

One of the researchers I spoke to was Kevin Schwinsky about an unusual project that you can contribute to.

We spoke in his office.

So Galaxy Zoo, that's right away it sounds like fun, but it's a really serious effort to get regular people involved in science, and it will obviously benefits you too.

Why don't you just tell us about it?

So Galaxy Zoo is a website through which we invite anybody out there with a computer to help us

in some astrophysics research. It really boils down to a task that turns out computers

really terrible at, which is recognizing

shapes. And on the other side, human brains, humans are really great at. And one of the

challenges in modern astronomy is that data sets have become so large. We've gone from hundreds to

thousands to millions of galaxies. And human eyes, a pair of human eyes, is still the

best way to sort through different kinds of galaxies and put them in categories that we can

then analyze. And so it turned out that with these large data sets, we just, there aren't enough

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