Crowd Funding Science (and finding exomoons)

So games, films and other projects have been getting crowd funded.  All of which is exciting – and now science is too!

Petridish.org, a crowd-funding website restricted specifically to accredited scientific research projects, is getting close to its first $100,000 in funds raised just a month after launching, according to founder Matt Salzberg.

“We have had two projects successfully reach the end of their funding cycles and both earned about $10,000 each,” Salzberg told TPM in a telephone interview, referring to a project to discover a new species of ants in Madagascar ($10,208) and a project to locate the first exomoon, or the first moon outside the solar system ($12,247).

On that subject – that last project which has got it’s funding – the exomoon is very exciting: