The Planetary Society is looking for about 30,000 volunteers to locate some 45 interstellar dust particles it figures are embedded in the aerogel collector aboard the Stardust space capsule, the one which just returned from its six-year jaunt into deep space.

They figure it will take 20 years of continuous scanning to find these dust particles in the supermagnified images they are generating, and so they’ve come up with the scheme to enlist a whole bunch of volunteers.

All you have to do is download stacks of images from the Internet server at the Cosmic Dust Lab at NASA Johnson Space Center. With each image, you move the focus button up and down, and start looking, looking, looking for a tiny trail. The dust particle is too tiny to see, but it’s thought to leave a trail, created on impact. While the trail is tiny as well, it’s conjectured to be discernable to the naked eye.

Find one, and you get listed as a co-author on any scientific paper which announces the discovery.

So, here’s one-and-a-half million images. Call us when you find something.

I read this story first in the San Francisco Chronicle, where in an aside, science writer Keay Davidson mentioned that “in the 1950s, physicists enlisted large teams of volunteers -- especially women, who for whatever reason seemed to have a special knack for the work -- to pore through stacks and stacks of images from particle accelerators in search of strange streaks that revealed previously unknown types of subatomic particles.”

Before I could get my feminist hackles up – which frankly act a lot like a cat in that the hackles in question spend most of their time sleeping – I suddenly remembered something. Long before miniaturization brought us the bevy of electronic chip-driven devices we have all around us, large computers were built out of components. In fact, the memories were constructed from little magnetic cores, like tiny donuts.

Since they were magnetic, the magnetic field of each core would point in one of two directions … and left unperturbed, would stay that way. Engineers figured out how to set the direction of the magnetic field of each little core, and read it as well, and that’s how the computers remembered 1 and 0. One direction meant 1, and the other, 0.

Now, each of these little cores were strung with three thin wires, and then these were all strung together, as well. This got you a whole bunchs of 1’s and 0’s, all lined up, but the main point is this: The core memories were wired in Japan by Japanese women. And why? Because they had the tiniest fingers and proved vigilant even in the face of this exhausting repetitive work.

My early feminist sensibilities have taken quite a beating over time, and that’s been especially true recently, as neuroscience is more definitive every day about the differing natural tendencies of men and women.

I’m no longer umbraged to think that we women might well be naturally suited to find these itsy-bitsy little dust trails, only a tenth of a millimeter long. And while the Planetary Society describes the total task as looking for 45 ants in a football field, I’m not even umbraged that such a sports analogy might be definitely male in orientation.

No, I think we women should just come out en masse and see if we can find those critters. I hate to be competitive, but it would also be nice, if after we got the hang of it, we wrote a computer program to automatically detect them in the future.

It’s not that we don’t want to help. It’s just that we women are very busy doing other things.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.