This is a misleading project name :(

It sounds like a statement or headline : "read all about it: Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones"

Rather it could be better to say: "help scientists detect cosmic rays with a crowd sourcing smartphone app"

The actual paper[0] title is somewhat precise: "Observing Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Smartphones"

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2895

Please change the title of this post to:

"Observing Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Smartphones"

Or you could link it to the previous submission (titled Observing Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Smartphones):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454680

There doesn't seem to be an obvious button for me to click to edit the headline once submitted??

Can capacitive touchscreens be perhaps useful, with their much larger surface areas?

For perspective, in mid-2013, the combined screen area of just all the iPhones ever manufactured, was around 1.33 square km (214.39 square feet). Source: http://www.wired.com/2013/06/iphone-screens/

The sorts of disturbances produced by cosmic ray particles are too small to be detectable by a capacitive touchscreen; if they were sensitive enough, it wouldn't function so well as a touchscreen - imagine suddenly occurring, mysterious ghost touches.

(If they were sensitive enough the hardware would probably filter these out anyway.)

1 337 647 square meters = 14 398 312.5 square feet [1]

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/#q=1337647+sqm+to+sqft

Ugh, I'm confused by those area conversions. Edited to 1.33 km^2. I believe it sounds right and puts scale into perspective.

There must be some mistake with the numbers as there are around 9 square feet per square meter. (?).

Can anyone speak to the potential battery drain from this thing?

Sounds like a wicked idea though. Like a more modern seti@home.

From the paper:

The application runs when the phone is not in active use. It launches itself when it detects a power source, and quits when the power is disconnected. No additional light shielding, such as tape, of the camera is required, other than placing the phone face-up (camera-down) on a table. In this way, no active participation is required once the application is installed and its operation should be fairly inobtrusive, which is critical to achieving wide participation in the smartphone community. To address user security concerns, no frames will be stored or up- loaded if the average pixel response value over the frame exceeds a threshold, such that full images cannot be re- constructed offline.

[snip]

Note that this assumes continuous operation; some degradation of observational power is expected, as phones will typically join the network during night-time charging. The observational power of such a network clearly hinges on the level of user adoption and continued participation.

--

This makes sense, there's no need to operate during the day; in fact it's much better to operate at night when background light (and therefore noise) is likely to be lower. Cosmic rays don't sleep.

It is only activated when it is plugged into a power source.

Actually, HTC has an application that you can run on your phone that can contribute to any BOINC projects, while the phone has its screen off and is charging - that includes helping Seti@Home. I have it on my phone so I contribute 8-10 hours of calculations to projects every single day when I go to sleep.

For the broader context: The Android app (BOINC, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.b...) that allows you to run SETI@Home on your Android device will also let you to support other volunteer distributed computing projects. The projects are from various fields of science like Einstein@Home (astrophysics), PrimeGrid (mathematics), or World Community Grid (humanitarian projects).

This is the HTC app I talked about:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htc.ptg

I am not sure what is different between this and the official BOINC app, apart from a sleeker interface. Both do the same thing.

Hmm, when I worked with light microscopes as an undergrad we used to find at least one pixel blown out completely in every image from a cosmic ray intersecting the CCD array. Looks like these guys are detecting tracks from particle decay affecting multiple pixels. Seems hard!

Direct link to the paper: http://crayfis.ps.uci.edu/paper.pdf

FTP:

Extensive air showers generated by cosmic rays produce muons and high-energy photons, which can be detected by the CMOS sensors of smartphone cameras.

No this does not validate the “Cosmic Rays Entering Earth From Mars” hoax.

Something similar project name to folding@home would be awesome. Like rays@phone.

Ooh, clever!

They want everybody to volunteer to install an app that captures images while the phone is asleep? That is a surveillance state's wet dream...

The phone must be placed face up (camera side down).

Yeah, NSA really needs to inspect the woodgrain on your dresser.