If you want to be a citizen scientist,the National Science Foundation(NSF) has got you covered.NSF supports citizen scientists across all areas of science,whether your passion（热情）is scanning the night sky,exploring your own backyard or playing video games.

Join a Flock of Birders

eBird is an online platform that allows bird-watchers to record their sightings on a massive online database. With more than 100,000 active users,eBird involves bird population,distribution（分布）and habitat that users can explore in real time.In May 2015,there were 9.5 million records uploaded.

Count Every Drop

The Community Collaborative Rain and Snow Network is the largest provider of daily rainfall observations in the United States.Volunteers set up rain instruments and record data every time a rain,or snow storm passes.Data is organized and shared on the CoCoRaHS website,and used by the National Weather Service,scientists,farmers and so on.

Join the Plankton Party

Without plankton（浮游生物）,life in the ocean would not exist.These tiny things form the base of the food chain and play an important role in the global carbon cycle.Plankton Party encourages citizen scientists to identify images snapped（拍照）by the ISIIS,an underwater robot.Classifying the images helps researchers understand plankton diversity,habitat and behavior.

Your next car might drive itself.After years of trials on city streets,driverless vehicles are now on the way.Last month,a driverless bus began carrying passengers through Lyon,France.Most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or earlier.

Driverless cars will first be huddled with human-driven cars.But the first places where they will become dominant（统治的）are highly populated urban areas.Many advanced cities are already reducing the role of human-driven cars.Driverless cars will quicken that process and will bring us enormous benefits.

Driverless cars will reduce accidents by around 90 percent.That's big—the annual deaths on the world's roads are about 1.2 million a year.Pollution and carbon emissions will drop,because urban driverless cars will be electric.

On the other hand,driverless cars will cause problems.Over the next 20 years,the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks,taxis and buses will see their jobs reduced.Traditional carmakers are especially scared.The cars of the future might be made by tech companies such as Apple,Baidu and Google.Imagine Germany,where automobile making is the largest industry.

Dramatic changes are coming,and driverless cars could arrive by 2020.But governments have barely begun thinking about it.Only 6 percent of the biggest US cities have taken them into their long-term planning.A decade ago anyone hardly saw the Smartphone coming.Now what about the driverless cars?

When Bonfield,the chief of the Women's Engineering Society,recently attended a military air show,she was in great shock.

There were around 900 girls among the crowd and Ms Bonfield said,"I'm saying to all these girls,'Do you know about engineering?Would you like to be an engineer?Have you thought about engineering?'And in the whole day... probably five or six of them said yes.Every other one said no,just straight out no."

What surprised her most wasn't that these girls didn't know what engineering was.It was simply that they had already switched off.They had lost interest in engineering."So how much work does it take to change that?"asked Ms Bonfield,"I mean it's huge."

There's no shortage of data to back up her ideas.The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that women make up around just 8% of engineers in the UK.And this is at a time when the UK needs to produce thousands more engineers,so much that the inventor,Sir James Dyson,is planning to open his own institute to deal with the skills shortage.

One of the reasons why girls don't choose engineering is that there are not enough female role models.The attitude of parents is also an important factor in career choices.For girls,perhaps unsurprisingly,mothers are particularly influential.

"My mum was a bit uncertain about it at first,"said middle school student Hannah,"But my dad used to build a lot of stuff and he got me into that.So after my mum saw how me and my dad interacted,she said,'Yeah,go for it' and she's kind of the one who supported me with this."

A simple gesture can be formed into a child's memory so quickly that it will cause the child to give a false answer to a question accompanied by that gesture.A new finding suggests that parents,social workers,psychologists and lawyers should be careful with their hands as well as their words.

While memories of both adults and children are easy to react to suggestion,those of children are known to be particularly influenced,said a researcher,Sara Broaders of Northwestern University.

Previous research,for example,has shown that detailed questions often cause false answers;when asked,say "Did you drink juice at the picnic?",the child is likely to say "yes" even if no juice had been available.It is not that the child is consciously lying,but rather the detail is quickly formed into his or her memory.

To avoid this problem,social workers have long been advised to ask children only open-ended questions,such as "What did you have at the picnic?"But an open-ended question paired with a gesture,is treated like a detailed question.That is,children become likely to answer falsely.

And 77% of children gave at least one piece of false information when a detail was suggested by an ordinary gesture.Gestures may also become more popular when talking with non-fluent language users,such as little kids. Broaders advises parents and other adults to "try to be aware of your hands when questioning a child about an event. Otherwise,you might be getting answers that don't mean what actually happened."