Today DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong reports on a project called Foldit, in which citizen scientists playing a slick computer game helped to unravel the complex structure of proteins, and in doing so got the game into the prestigious journal Nature.

There are plenty of great ways for non-professional scientists to help out scientific projects. DISCOVER previously brought you the ways to donate your computer’s free time to projects like SETI@home and Stardust@home. But what if you want to use your own brainpower in the aid of science? That can be arranged, as there are plenty of more active ways to contribute to crowdsourced science.

1. Mapping the place where Genghis Khan was buried

This summer archaeologist Albert Yu-Min Lin led an expedition to Mongolia in search of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan—but not before putting out the call for a little help.

Lin’s team provided high-resolution satellite photography of the area they plan to survey. On the mission’s website, volunteers can sign up to scan the images for anything that could help the team on its quest: roads, rivers, or perhaps even the outlines of where long-gone structures once stood centuries ago.

2. Amateur Martians

As we noted yesterday with the Spirit rover’s apparent demise, the rovers and orbiters NASA has sent to Mars have been a smashing success. The only problem is, those robot explorers have sent home more data than NASA’s people can map on their own.

You can help: Play “Be a Martian,” a game set up through the Jet Propulsion Lab. Players earn points and badges by finding the most interesting martian craters for study, or by matching up high-resolution images of the red planet’s surfaces to wider photos taken from above—thereby improving maps of Mars.

3. Fixing that little oil spill down south

With a temporary cap in place and the more permanent “static kill” and relief well measures on their way, we hope that BP is on the cusp of shutting down its oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico for good (fingers crossed). But even if they succeed, the gargantuan task of cleanup remains.

You can help. When BP asked the public to submit ideas for fixing the spill, it got 300,000 responses. Certainly many were kooky, but as the DISCOVER blog The Intersection noted, one proposed scheme seems very similar to the container cap on the leak now. And the X-Prize foundation, which offers multi-million dollar prizes for things like the best lunar craft or high-mileage car, said it would consider such a lucrative prize for the right idea to clean up BP’s mess.

If you’re no Kevin Costner and don’t have an oil cleanup machine in your garage, scientists still could use some help in the long recovery that’s only just beginning. One man, Drew Wheelan of the American Birding Association, sought help this summer to count the ghost crabs on the Gulf Coast, which are imperiled by the oil but harder to count than turtles or birds.

4. reCAPTCHA

You might have already helped reCAPTCHA without even knowing it.

The project, started in 2008 and acquired by Google last year, is helping to digitize old documents like books and The New York Times archive by using talents you have that computers don’t. CAPTCHAs are those squiggly letters and numbers that websites ask you to interpret to prove you’re not a spambot. And the degraded text in old newspapers tends to look a little like CAPTCHAs, making it difficult for computers to digitize them.

So, when computers can’t figure out a word, they ask us. The word or phrase is put into a CAPTCHA, where humans read it with 99 percent accuracy.

5. Galaxy Zoo – classifying galaxies (and more)

Computers have a hard time understanding messy old letters running into each other, and they have a hard time understanding messy old galaxies running into each other, too.

The people behind the Galaxy Zoo project want to understand galactic collisions, and how those collisions helped to provide the variety of galaxy types we see across the universe. So the system shows a volunteer an real image of two galaxies merging into one, surrounded by my computer-simulated images of different types of galactic smash-ups. You, the volunteer, choose the closest match. And when person after person does this with galaxy collision after galaxy collision, a better view of the universe’s evolution comes into view.

Galaxy Zoo volunteers have already turned up a new kind of galaxy, called “green pea” for its appearance. Professional astronomers alone probably couldn’t have scanned enough images to notice this, and computers’ talents aren’t well suited to spotting these oddballs.

We humans notice a surprise.

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Related Content:
DISCOVER: The 14 Best Ways To Use Your Computer’s Spare Time
80beats: NASA Invites You To “Be a Martian” And Explore the Red Planet’s Terrain
80beats: Computers Exploit Human Brainpower to Decipher Faded Texts
80beats: Crowdsourced Astronomy Project Discovers “Green Pea” Galaxies
The Intersection: Who Gets Credit For the BP Container Cap? You Do.

Images: GeoEye; Wikimedia Commons

My friend Glenn Schneider is an astronomer, and also a little bit nuts. He’s an umbraphile, an eclipse-chaser. But he’s not just any guy who travels the world to watch solar eclipses, he gets neck-deep into them. He actually chartered a plane and organized an incredible trip to see the total solar eclipse a few weeks ago — I wrote about this as he was planning it.

Glenn sent me a note to say that the trip was a complete success! They had more than nine minutes of totality to watch — that’s literally more than is ever possible on the ground, because a plane can "chase the shadow", counteracting the rotation of the Earth. He has some details and some great pictures on his site. Check this out:

The blue streamers above and below the Sun (and the dark spot below the Sun) are not real, but artifacts produced by the plane window and the camera. Still, that’s incredible. Sigh. I swear, one of these days I’ll go with him. I’ve still never seen a total solar eclipse. Some day…

Here’s an excerpt from my first post at the Techonomy blog–just introducing myself. You can read the full post here.

This is my first post on the Techonomy blog, so I mainly want to introduce myself. I’m Chris Mooney, a blogger for Discover and author of several books about the relationship between science and politics, and how things sometimes go dramatically splat in this area.

So I may seem, in some ways, an odd duck at Techonomy—except for the following fact.

As someone who’s extensively covered climate change, evolution, and stem cell battles (among others), I’ve learned there’s a fundamental dynamic here. Something in science or in technology comes along and dramatically changes our lives—and then people resist it. They fight back against the future, or change, or just plain reality.

Grasping this dynamic has in turn led me to look for the next set of issues that are bound to create similar tensions. That’s where Techonomy comes in….READ ON.

Opportunity's first dust devil. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/Texas A&M

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity captured this dust devil on camera.  This is the first one for Opportunity in the six and a half years on the planet.  Spirit has seen dozens of them.  I thought sure Oppy had seen one but no, not according to the press release.

This particular dust devil was seen on July 15th while the rover was taking pictures with its panoramic camera to do a bit of drive planning.  The dustier conditions near Gusev Crater where Spirit has been working are likely more favorable to create the phenomenon.

Just a day before the dust devil was spotted, conditions near Opportunity were windy enough to blow some dust off the solar panels and increased the power output by 10 percent.  Opportunity took a series of pictures on Sol 2220 (in April) which were put together to give a 360 degree view of the area, looks pretty desolate – click here to view it.

It’s not every day that people can get published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals by playing computer games, but Foldit is no ordinary game. The brainchild of Seth Cooper from the University of Washington, Foldit taps into the collective efforts of tens of thousands computer gamers to solve scientific problems.

The goal of the game is to work out the complicated three-dimensional structures of different proteins. Proteins are feats of biological origami; they consist of long chains of amino acids that fold into very specific and complicated shapes. These shapes can reveal how proteins work but solving them is fiendishly challenging. To do it, scientists typically need to grow crystals of purified protein before bouncing X-rays off them. Foldit takes a different approach, using the collective efforts of causal gamers to do the hard work. And its best players can outperform software designed to do the same job. Best of all, you don’t need a PhD to play Foldit, or any scientific training at all. The controls are intuitive, tutorial levels introduce the game’s mechanics, colourful visuals provide hints, and the interface is explained in simple language. While protein scientists concern themselves with “rotating alpha-helices” and “fixing degrees of freedom”, Foldit players simply ‘tweak’, ‘freeze’, ‘wiggle’ and ‘shake’ their on-screen shapes. It’s telling that barely an eighth of the players work in science, and two-thirds of the top scorers have no biochemistry experience beyond high school.

Foldit’s success relies on the fact that it doesn’t shallowly flirt with interactivity – it’s a true game. Cooper designed it to “attract the widest possible audience… and encourage prolonged engagement”. For a start, that meant making it competitive. Players are scored based on the stability of the structures they end up with and a leader board shows how they rank against other gamers.

There’s also a social side – gamers can chat on online forums, work in groups to solve puzzles and share solutions on a wiki. Of course, there’s the thrill of contributing to genuine scientific research, but that motivates less than half of the community. The rest do it for the achievement, the social aspects and largely, because the game was fun and immersive.

And just like real game development, everything was tuned according to feedback from the players. Tools were added and refined, the difficulty of the tutorials was tweaked to stop frustrated beginners from leaving, and puzzles were matched to the skills of the players.

Foldit’s origins lie within Rosetta, a piece of software designed to solve protein structures by simulating and testing thousands of different folds. Rosetta is an example of ‘distributed computing’, where volunteers run the program on their home computers when they don’t need it. They effectively donate their computing power to speed up the laborious task of solving protein structures. But the volunteers wanted to use their biological computers – their brains – as well as their man-made ones. They suggested an interactive version of the programme and in May 2008, they got their wish with Foldit.

To test the usefulness of the approach, Cooper challenged his gamers with ten puzzles – proteins whose structures were solved but weren’t on any public database. Even so, the Foldit players did themselves proud. They outperformed the original Rosetta software on five of the puzzles and matched it on three of them. And in the two cases where Rosetta actually beat the players, it still didn’t get anywhere near the right answer.

The human gamers had many advantages that gave them the edge. The players used a far wider range of strategies than Rosetta does, and some specialise in the early, middle or late stages of the game. And they were also good at working out where to begin. In one game, when they were given ten possible starting structures, they picked the one that was closest to the actual answer. Armed with the same starting set, Rosetta couldn’t do as well.

The humans also had the massive advantage of long-term planning. Rosetta uses a “rebuild and refine” method to gradually arrive at the most stable structure through tiny tweaks. But it won’t investigate a potentially interesting move if it means making the protein temporarily less stable. The gamers had no such problems. They were quite happy to substantially unravel the protein because they knew that they could put it back together in an even better state.

“Computers are obviously superior in the ability to crunch numbers, but lack the intuitive sense of knowing when to crunch numbers, or which tool to best use at a certain point in the game,” says CharlieFortsConscience, one of Foldit’s gamers. “The experience and intuition part of the gameplay, for me, is being able to look fresh at a puzzle structure and note which areas ‘don’t look right’.”

But even experience and intuition has its limits. Some puzzles proved too much for them. While some could solve the hardest of challenges – folding a full protein from its extended chain of amino acids – most struggled. Cooper thinks that he’ll get the best outcomes by blending the best of both human creativity and computer power. If Rosetta can take them half-way, gamers can finish the job with aplomb.

Cooper was so impressed with the players’ strategies that he thinks he can use them to design better algorithms for later versions of Rosetta. As he says, “Our results indicate that scientific advancement is possible if even a small fraction of the energy that goes into playing computer games can be channelled into scientific discovery.” It’s a perfect example of what Clay Shirky describes as the “cognitive surplus” – the free time and mental energy that’s spent on leisure pursuits. Thanks to the Internet, this valuable resource could be channelled into something more productive.

In the meantime, the gamers themselves can smile at the fact that they’ve been published in the prestigious journal Nature. They’re final authors on Cooper’s new Nature paper, listed anonymously (as seems fitting) as the “Foldit players”.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09304

More on computer science and video games:

• Sniff-detector allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair
• Photo-recognition software catches tigers by their stripes
• Using our powers for good – how web security software can help to transcribe old books
• Brain-training games get a D at brain-training tests
• RCT: video games can hamper reading and writing skills in young boys by displacing other activities

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

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Around 105 million years ago, Tanzania was home to a very strange creature. It was about the size of a cat and had features that wouldn’t look out of place on a mammal – a slender frame, long legs, a short skull and a variety of teeth for cutting and grinding its food. But this was no mammal – it was a crocodile.

The newly discovered Pakasuchus has many trademark features that clearly mark it out as a crocodilian – the group that includes modern crocs and alligators. But it was very different to these living relatives, and some of its features were so mammal-like that its name even means “cat crocodile”.

Consider its skull. All modern crocs have a snout full of consistently conical teeth. They snap at their prey with a powerful bite, before swallowing them whole. But Pakasuchus had a diverse set of chompers including piercing canines and grinding molars. It even had shearing teeth like those of cats and other meat-eating mammals. This ancient croc clearly ate its prey in a very different way. It’s dramatic proof that living crocodiles are just a thin branch of what was once an incredibly varied lineage, which came in many shapes, sizes and lifestyles.

Pakasuchus lived in the mid-Cretaceous period, when the gigantic supercontinent called Pangaea has begun to split up into separate land masses. In the Northern Hemisphere, small mammals were on the rise, exploiting all sorts of fresh ecological opportunities while dinosaurs loomed overhead. But in the Southern Hemisphere, small mammals were relatively rare and crocodiles came to fulfil the same roles using very similar adaptations.

Patrick O’Connor from Ohio University led a team that unearthed the little crocodile at Tanzania’s Rukwa Rift Basin. He named it Pakasuchus kapilimai after the Kiswahili word for ‘cat’, the Greek word for ‘crocodile’, and the late Professor Saidi Kapilima, who was an important part of the excavation. The team found several specimens of Pakasuchus but one in particular was in stunning condition.

The animal’s mouth was tightly shut when it died, so O’Connor used a medical scanner to study the details of its unusual jaws and teeth. The scans revealed that Pakasuchus only had 13 teeth, far fewer than its modern relatives. The teeth were very diverse, as the movie below show. And its molars fit together extremely well, and could grind and shear food with the aid of a mobile jaw. These traits are a standard part of a mammal’s hardware but they’re completely unprecedented in crocodiles.

Pakasuchus bizarre features don’t end in its mouth. It had long slender legs and nostrils on the front end of its snout, which suggests that it lived on land. Modern crocodiles, which primarily hunt in water, have short legs (they use their tails to swim) and their nostrils are on the top of their snout to allow them to breathe more easily at the surface.

Pakasuchus also lacks the heavy bony plates, or ‘osteoderms’, that are found on virtually all other crocs, whether living or extinct. Its tail is the only place that retains this body armour. O’Connor thinks that this species was an active hunter that sacrificed its cumbersome protection in favour of agility and speed.

By comparing Pakasuchus’s entire skeleton to those of several other crocodilians, O’Connor discovered that it belongs to a large extinct group called the notosuchians. This lineage is famed for its diversity. Pakasuchus was the only one with molars that met, but the others had their own weird adaptations. They included plant-eating Chimaerasuchus; Notosuchus with a possible pig-like snout and fleshy cheeks; Armadillosuchus with its banded, armadillo-like body armour; the bizarre, rabbit-toothed Yacarerani; and Anatosuchus with a broad, duck-like snout.

All of these species were medium-sized land-living creatures with features and habits that are decidedly unlike the typical crocodile. They were a highly successful part of the Cretaceous ecosystem, eking out lifestyles that mammals were sharing in the opposite hemisphere. Perhaps the eventual coming of mammalian competitors, or a significant environmental change, sealed the fate of these bizarre crocs. Whatever the case, it’s clear that today’s species are just the very tip of a once-diverse lineage.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09061

More on crocodiles:

• Crocodiles signal hatching time by calling from inside their eggs
• Stealthy alligators dive, rise and roll by moving their lungs

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

The Silurian Period, 425 million years ago: As volcanic ash rained down on proto-England, a sea blob named Drakozoon gave its last. Now, using a computer model, scientists have finally witnessed what the soft-bodied ancient looked like in 3D.

Researchers first found a Drakozoon fossil six years ago in Herefordshire Lagerstätte, home to England’s mother-load of soft-bodied fossils. Such fossils are rare since most of these creatures decompose before a fossil can form.To capitalize on the find, a team chopped the Drakozoon fossil into 200 pieces, photographed those slices, and used a computer to construct a rotatable image of the old softy.

They found that Drakozoon, which was little more than a tenth of an inch long, had a hood that it wrapped around itself to ward off predators, and had tentacles for snaring microscopic food bits out of neighboring water. The researchers also noted that Drakozoon had eight ridges on the sides of its body, what they believe could be vestiges of an evolutionary step up from creatures with repeating body segments, similar to modern-day caterpillars. The critter was described in the journal Biology Letters.

Mark Sutton, from the Imperial College London’s earth science and engineering department, said in a college press release:

“Excitingly, our 3D model brings back to life a creature that until recently no one knew even existed. . .”

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Image: Imperial College London