Cellphones for Science

Being at the right place with a camera phone can make anyone an amateur reporter nowadays. How about turning cellphone users into amateur scientists? Cellphones can take pictures, record sounds, reveal location, and even measure temperature and sense light. And they are everywhere-there are more than 260 million subscribers in the United States alone. So cellphones seem an ideal tool for collecting research data, according to Eric Paulos, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University´s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, in Pittsburgh.