Always wanted to participate in climate science research? Don’t let the lack of a PhD stand in your way. Citizen science — when we ordinary people participate in scientific research — allows scientists to drastically scale up their projects by crowd-sourcing data, widening their scope of research, Bloomberg reports.

Sometimes we know more than the pros: Amateur divers involved in the Sea Watchers network send underwater photographs to scientists tracking the health of marine life all over the world. The network’s organizers say their divers are better able to notice changes in the environment than the scientists, due to their familiarity and emotional connection to the spots.

And citizens working together can create huge datasets: The Globe at Night project has collected more than 200k measurements in 14 years on light levels in the night sky. People can contribute easily by taking a picture on their phone and uploading it through an app. Scientists draw on the database for studies on the impacts of light pollution.

Are we reliable scientists, though? According to a recent paper, citizen-generated data collected for a UK study measuring shoreline algae coverage was found to be as reliable as that gathered by scientists. That said, the paper still emphasized that volunteers should be trained and well-equipped when conducting research, and get further scientific guidance when working on more complex projects.

“We need to stop thinking about citizens as people who have no idea,” Francisco Sanz, executive director at internet citizen research platform Ibercivis, told Bloomberg. “People are interested and, when given the chance, they can find the evidence that researchers need to really change things.”

How you can get in on the action: Platforms like SciStarter in the US and Europe’s EU-citizen.science help volunteers filter projects by location, research topic, and necessary skills, with options to get involved around the world.

Video game companies are getting in on citizen science: A mini-game/citizen science platform called Project Discovery has delivered the equivalent of nearly 500 years of work on studying the immune system’s response to COVID-19, Wired reports. The game is part of the multiplayer space opera, Eve Online, one of the longest-running multiplayer games online. Project Discovery players analyze the blood of infected humans through gameplay, helping to pick out specific patterns that predict the severity of the disease. The data collected through the game will also be used as training data for AI systems so that the process can be automated in the future, potentially helping with research into other diseases.

Gamers could help scientists cure HIV, cancer and Alzheimer’s: Foldit is an innovative crowdsourcing computer game that attempts to predict the structure of a protein. Proteins are complex molecules that are involved in almost all our bodily processes, and their structures are key to understanding how they work and how to target them with medication. Proteins are part of so many diseases and they can also be part of the cure — the issue is there is a monumental number of ways even small proteins can fold, making it difficult and costly using current methods, for even computers to work out which of the many possible structures is the best one, rendering it one of the most difficult problems in biology today. Foldit is taking people’s problem-solving skills and having them compete to see who can create the best proteins. Players can design new proteins that could help in preventing or treating major diseases.