Crowdsourcing. It’s been used for everything from handicapping the next election to making a kick-ass encyclopedia to building a better movie recommendation tools for Netflix. America’s spy agencies are hoping it can help ‘em predict what’s going to happen on the world stage next. In other words, Washington’s next sharp-eyed intelligence analyst could be you.

The largest telescope ever to exist is the proposed Square Kilometre Array but with a sticker price of $2.1BN, researchers are hoping to cut costs by using distributed computing to leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.

Developers have created a crowdsourced radiation map to track the flow of radiation from the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, using a mix of government sources and data from amateurs equipped with geiger counters.

The intensifying nuclear crisis in Japan is raising anxieties on both sides of the Pacific over the potential impacts of radiation exposure, and a relative dearth of official information on radiation levels is leading some to turn to crowdsourced options.

Web users around the globe will be able to help professional astronomers in their search for Earth-like planets thanks to a new online citizen science project called Planet Hunters. Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA's Kepler mission.

NASA scientists are crowdsourcing lunar exploration by appealing to space fans to help identify features on the Moon - and even to discover the wreckage of long-lost spacecraft.

In a recent talk, Jonathan Zittrain argues that crowdsourcing technologies have the potential to be used by repressive governments to aid in government surveillance.

Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.