The allure of Kickstarter, I think, is that the end product is something that a typical layman can enjoy/use/appreciate, e.g. phone stands, documentary films, weird art, etc. Compare and contrast with the following example, from the algal spore research proposal:<p>"Your support will go towards financing the raw materials to make a device that simulates the types of forces (shear forces) that spores are likely to feel in a boundary layer..."<p>This is cool and I would like to support this research but this is more like a charity than Kickstarter to me since I don't even have a good understanding of the motivation and the mechanism of this work.
Why not use Kickstarter for this? Is there something about Kickstarter that makes it necessary to have a separate site for science? It seems that the audience that uses Kickstarter is the one you want for Petridish.
More discussion about petridish.org on HN:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680033" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680033</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680002" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680002</a>
Got $5000 to spare? Get an ant species named in your honor.<p><a href="http://www.petridish.org/projects/new-species-of-ants-in-madagascar" rel="nofollow">http://www.petridish.org/projects/new-species-of-ants-in-mad...</a>
Hey, this looks familiar!<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577492" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577492</a><p>This looks really executed though, best of luck to your project.
This is so awesome! I am not a scientist but I know a quite bit about astrophysics that I have a hunch that you can accurately predict a supernova explosion (of massive stars) by simply knowing how much neutrino the star is emitting and the rate of change. Of course you would need to know its exact mass, and the only way to do that is to figure out its distance which at this point are just rough estimates. Maybe I'll try to raise funding for it one day through this.....