Do you want to help solve the problems of the world? You can help even without any specific training. Type ‘Citizen Science’ into your favorite web browser and find a project. Scientists all over the world use people like you and me to solve their problems. From ‘Climate Change’ to ‘Asteroid Hunting’ to ‘Genetics’ and a thousand other topics, you can help. Some projects are as simple as loaning your home computers idle time to help crunch numbers. One of the the first of these was (and still is) SETI@Home. This is one that I participated in for many years. Here is a website hosted by the Smithsonian to help projects find helpers. http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/

(The Great Courses – A Visual Guide to the Universe)