Thanks to Linode for supporting  this episode of SciShow.  You can go to linode.com/scishow  to learn more and get a  $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. [♪INTRO]  A lot of us think about science as a narrow,  top-down process, where there are “scientists” and   there are “not-scientists.” Scientists wear white  coats, work in labs, write a bunch of papers,   and then teach the rest of the not-scientists  about it, in a way that only someone with a   degree in science could do.

But there are a lot  more ways that we can study the world around us   and produce important knowledge. Often,  indigenous tribes, citizen scientists,   volunteers, or just everyday people living their  lives and looking around them play a crucial   role in driving academic inquiry.

And sometimes  they’re even the ones making these discoveries,   way before the researchers do. So here are five  instances where people just like you and me beat   the scientists at their own game. When it comes to  collecting observational data on certain species   of birds, YouTube creators have a feather in their  cap.

There’s a group of birds called tits. Yes,   really. Tits build their nests using  animal fur from a variety of sources,   with one study finding that tit nests contained  fur from more than twenty species.

The fur is   a great insulator to keep their nests  warm, and it may strengthen the nests   structurally or even deter predators or  parasites. But until recently, no one had  looked into how these birds  collected that hair. Since  researchers were fairly sure  none of these birds were also  barbers, they assumed that  the birds were gathering the  fur from ground sheddings or  from animal carcasses, since  doing so is low risk and high,  hairy reward.

However, it  turns out that not only were  these birds sourcing their furs  from live animals, but the  evidence that they do so has  been available for years. A  search on Youtube will pop up  with dozens of videos of  birds diving down and pulling  hair directly from live animals,  some of which were posted  as far back as 2012. Often these videos show birds stealing fur from sleeping dogs and cats,   and sometimes from potential   predators like foxes and raccoons.

Most interesting of all, some show them   stealing hair directly off of humans’ heads, and some of   them were even willing participants. Which,   if you ask me, is taking the whole “sharing is caring” idea a little   bit too far. But videos like this inspired a group of   researchers to classify this behavior within the academic   literature.

They named the practice kleptotrichy,   which comes from the Greek words “klepto,” to steal and “trich,”   hair. While this may not be the first time anecdotal evidence has led to academic  publications, it’s the only  one we know of where Youtube  played a key role in the  process. Now, social media and  video-sharing websites aren’t  the only ways that people  have documented nature before  researchers could get to  it.

As meteorologists have  gotten better at predicting the  occurrence of auroras, more  people have been able to  take up aurora-hunting as a hobby, armed with high-resolution cameras to document what they see.  Starting in 2015, photographers  on the hunt for Northern  Lights in Alberta started  noticing an unexpected pattern in  the dancing lights. Instead of  typical ribbons of green, blue,  yellow, or purple light, these  strange patterns looked like  long, skinny columns of mauve-ish light, sometimes accompanied by several short dashes   of green. Although these were appearing   on nights where auroras were more likely to occur, the photographers   didn’t think that they were the same as a regular   aurora.

These funky lights looked more like something   called “proton auroras,” which are more likely to occur at lower   latitudes, but are also almost impossible to spot   with the naked eye. So these photographers concluded that,   since these were neither true auroras nor proton auroras,   the light show needed its own name. And since the   new phenomenon had no official name, the citizen scientists decided   to call the arc simply “Steve.” Hey,   you try naming a brand new astronomical phenomenon.

Eventually, one of these photographers  showed these pictures of Steve–  No, not that Steve, these  pictures of Steve to researchers at NASA, and they launched a series of investigations   aimed at determining what exactly this beam of   light was. It turns out that Steve is, in part, the end product   of a long chain reaction between the sun and Earth’s   magnetic field. Generally, auroras form when charged   particles from the sun collide with gasses in the upper atmosphere,   causing electrons to rain down and   producing the pretty waves of light we all know.

However, subsequent investigations have  determined that Steve is  actually two separate phenomena  occurring simultaneously,  which makes it both an aurora  and not an aurora. The green  picket fence is a true aurora  created by electrons raining  down from the sun. However,  the colorful purple arc  comes from charged particles  colliding in the upper atmosphere.  The friction from these  interactions heats the molecules  and causes them to emit  this beautiful, wavy light.  Much the same way electricity  heats the filament inside an  incandescent lightbulb until it’s  hot enough to glow.

The team  of academics and citizen  scientists decided to name  the new phenomenon a Strong  Thermal Emission Velocity  Enhancement. Or, STEVE for  short, as an homage to the  original photographers who  made the investigations possible through their  documentation. All that said,  the next time a bunch of  photographers discover  something new in the sky, here’s  hoping they workshop the name  a little bit longer.

This next  story is about a time where  researchers thought they knew  best, but ended up eating  some fruity humble pie. The  island of Borneo is in Southeast  Asia and is home to over  50 different ethnic groups of  people. Two of these groups,  the Iban and Dusun people,  recently shed light on a  taxonomic mistake Western  biologists had been making for  almost 200 years.

The first  researcher to document the  plants in the region wrote about  a tree he called Artocarpus  odoratissimus. They noted,  however, that there was a lot of  variety in this species of  tree, with some having larger  leaves and sweeter fruit than  others. However, the Iban  and Dusun people, who cultivated  the trees, used different  words to refer to the two  kinds of tree.

The Iban people  called the trees with larger  fruits and leaves lumok, and the  ones with smaller, less sweet  fruits pingan. To see if this  linguistic difference would  be represented in the DNA, a  team of researchers compared  the genotypes of the these  trees and found that they were  indeed genetically distinct  species, instead of varying  members of a single species.  The authors note that the  primary motivation for the  genetic sequencing was the  indigenous peoples’ linguistic  specification, and Iban and  Dusun people were included in  the study. It seems like those  who have cultivated and ate  the plant for generations knew much more than the botanists who occasionally came into the   field.

Who would have thought? Now,   when trying to piece together the lives and practices of people long gone,   we can sometimes turn to experimental archaeology.   This often involves extensive research into the technologies   available to people at the time, and an intimate   knowledge of whatever literature is around, meaning that experimental   archaeologists tend to be entrenched in their   academic field of study. But in 2008, a Baltimore hair stylist made waves   among those who study ancient   Rome.

When Janet Stephens first saw a bust of a Roman empress at a Baltimore museum, she was  captivated by the woman’s  hairstyle. In order to figure out  how the ancient Romans did  it, she tried to recreate the  ornate hairdo on her own, but  didn’t get very far at first. It  wasn’t until she tried sewing  the braids of hair together with  a needle and thread that she  was able to replicate the  empress’s look.

But to her  surprise, there was no mention  of hair sewing in any research  about Roman hairstyling.  Most archaeologists thought  that these hairstyles were  impossible to achieve with  the wearer’s own hair, and  could only be created using  wigs. Following a hunch,  Stephens decided to dig deeper and see if the archaeologists were missing something.   Her research led her through 800 years   of Roman texts describing various cosmetic practices, leading   her to spot something that may have gotten lost in translation.   During her research, she noted that the Roman word   “acus” was generally being translated by scholars as a   catch-all term for three distinct instruments: a hair bodkin,   a needle-and-thread, and a hair curling iron. She eventually   found sources that referenced its translation specifically as   the same instrument that cloth-menders used,   in effect, a needle and thread, which supported her claim that the Romans used sewing or  weaving to create their  elaborate hairdos.

In order to  demonstrate her theory, she  reproduced several complex  Ancient Roman hairstyles  using multiple types of hair  fasteners, identified Roman  artifacts that could have gotten  the job done, and even found  historical cosmetic sets that  included these same needles.  Her research was published  in the Journal of Roman  Archaeology in 2008, making her  only the second non-archaeologist  to do so in the journal’s  history. The journal’s editor  even said of her work, “I could  tell even from the first version  that it was a very serious  piece of experimental  archaeology which no scholar who  was not a hairdresser—in  other words, no scholar—would  have been able to write.” But all  that said, the jury’s still out  on whether “The Roman” will  ever be the next big trend in  hair. Our last story isn’t a  singular discovery, and instead  shouts out one of the largest  and most impactful citizen  science projects out there,  which you can take part in,   too.

But before we get there,  a little background on how this  project came to be. Right  around the turn of the 20th  century, it was a popular  tradition in the United States to  engage in a Christmas Side  Hunt. During these hunts,  opposing groups of hunters  would compete to see whose  side could shoot the most animals,  usually birds and foxes.

However,   there was a young officer at the then-fledgling Audubon Society named Frank Chapman who proposed  an alternative to the hunt:  Instead of shooting at birds,  what if we counted them? And  so, he organized the first  ever Christmas Bird Census  which took place in the year  1900 on Christmas Day. Twenty  seven birders participated  in various locations throughout  the United States and  Canada, counting up a total  of 90 bird species.

Over a  hundred years later, the bird  count lives on, and the flock of  bird-brains participating has  only grown. For starters, the  count is now conducted over  a three-week period, from  December 14th through January  5th. Now, around 80,000  birdwatchers sign up each  year across Canada, the United  States, Latin America, the  Caribbean, and the Pacific  Islands.

In the 2018 to 2019  count, volunteers tallied more  than 48 million birds from over  2,600 different species. And  these bird counts aren’t just  for fun. Knowing what’s up  with bird populations helps  conservation efforts across the  globe.

Researchers,  conservation organizations, and  government agencies all use  the database to assess bird  populations and help guide  conservation efforts. To date,  The Audubon Society claims  that their database has been  cited in over 300 peer-reviewed  articles. All of which has  come from the observations of  citizen scientists.

Science is  about so much more than  sitting in a lab and writing up  papers. It’s a process, and  a way of thinking about the  world. And if you’d like to  volunteer to do some science,  you can sign up for the Annual  Christmas Bird Count using  the link below.

But if you find  anything new out there, make  sure you pick a better name  than Steve. So you too can be  a scientist without the hefty  price tag of a formal academic  degree. And if the price tag  is keeping you back from cloud  computing too, you might check out Linode Cloud Computing.

Pricing should not be a barrier to   the endless online tools   that cloud computing gives you access to. That’s why Linode, a cloud computing company from  Akamai, lets you pay for the  services that you need without  bundling them under an unattainable  price tag. Their prices  are transparent and all listed  on their website so you know  what you’re paying for and  how much it costs before a  single transaction.

That tech  helps you do things like watch  SciShow for free, because  everyone should be able to  enjoy seeing the world  complexly. And to make it even  more affordable, Linode is  giving SciShow viewers a $100  60-day credit on a new Linode  account. To get that credit,  just click the link in the  description down below or search  for linode.com/scishow.

Thanks for watching  and thanks to Linode for supporting this   SciShow video! [♪ OUTRO]