geek. noun. ˈgēk : enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity.

There’s little doubt that darn near every researcher in the #SciFund Challenge is a geek, according to the definition above. “Ethusiastic” and “expert” are perfect descriptions of the #SciFund participants! (And we do things like make glowing bacteria draw the #SciFund logo for us. Thanks, Siouxsie!)

May 25^th was Geek Pride Day. There are many reasons for this. It is the anniversary of Star Wars. It is Towel Day. And it is the Glorious 25 May  in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

There were two additional reasons to celebrate geek pride yesterday. One was this:

A new spaceship, Dragon, docked with the International Space Station. It’s the first spacecraft to be owned and run by individual people rather than nations.

And sometime in the dying hours of May 25^th, the second round of #SciFund surpassed the total contributions of round 1. Ladies and gentleman, we have a new record!

That’s a reason to be proud.

As a reminder, it took 45 days (six weeks) of November and December last year to get to $76,230 dollars. We’ve cracked that in just 25 days in this round.

And we’ve done it without any obvious breakout projects. Last time, Kristina Killgrove’s Roman DNA project raised over $10,000 alone, and was a big contributor to the Round 1 total. To date in Round 2, only one project has made half that. The support is much more evenly distributed across the projects this time.

While it’s early, this hints that science crowdfunding will follow the patterns that we’ve seen for arts and technology: slow, steady growth as more people learn about it and become connected to projects and scientists they believe in.

And we still have six days to go! New challenge: to raise $100,000 for science!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0AvVjzDlXo[/youtube]