The blogosphere was a-twitter last week with news of the first scientific experiment to be conducted on Twitter, the Internet-based instant-messaging service (http://twitter.com). The experiment may lack rigour, but it does encourage public participation in the scientific process.

On The Great Beyond blog, assistant news editor Richard Van Noorden reports that psychologist Richard Wiseman will use Twitter to test 'remote viewing' — the psychic ability to identify a distant locale without being shown or told what it is (http://tinyurl.com/kpjf76). Wiseman will 'tweet' from an undisclosed location, and then allow those following him on Twitter to vote on five possible locations posted as photos on a website.

If the voting were independent, Wiseman, at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, calculates that getting a majority of voters to 'hit' on his location by chance in at least 3 out of 4 trials would be 1 in 37. However, the nature of social networking means that voting will not be truly independent. The results from four such trials are expected to be published on Wiseman's blog this week (http://tinyurl.com/kls85q).