It just seems like you are matching square colors in a pretty Flash game. But the colored squares represent the four nucleotides of DNA. You are actually comparing sections of genetic material across species, looking for the best alignment (and possibly mapping areas that cause disease.) The site is Canadian and so can be played in both French and English.
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Folding@Home lets your computer solve disease.
When proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences including many well known diseases such as Alzheimer’s and many cancers. Run Folding@Home on your home computer or on your Playstation 3 to help scientist figure out these diseases. To fold proteins on your PS3, download the “Life with PlayStation” application and then choose “Folding@home” channel. Stanford University runs this project.
Play Phylo to help scientists sort DNA.
It just seems like you are matching square colors in a pretty Flash game. But the colored squares represent the four nucleotides of DNA. You are actually comparing sections of genetic material across species, looking for the best alignment (and possibly mapping areas that cause disease.) The site is Canadian and so can be played in both French and English.
Find deep space objects at Galaxy Zoo.
Take a close look at some of those gorgeous photos from the Hubble Telescope. Look at the stars and galaxies…and then classify them. Afron Smith, Technical Lead of Galaxy Zoo, recalls, “There was the user Hanny van Arkel, who did just that, went a little bit beyond just looking at the task that she was assigned. And she noticed something a little bit unusual in one of the photos, and she wrote to the project staff and asked them, what is this thing?”
Miss van Arkel had discovered a new astronomical phenomenon! “And it’s since been named after her. It’s called Hanny’s Voorwerp,” says Smith. (“Voorwerp” is Dutch for “object.”)
Will you be the next Hanny van Arkel?
EteRNA lets you design new RNA in an online game.
Compete online to design new viable patterns of ribonucleic acid or RNA. You know, those chains of four bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil that stick together in specific pairings to turn genes on or off. You fold ‘em, you match ‘em to make unique structures. The best designs are chosen every week to be synthesized in an actual laboratory to see how well they would hold up in real life. Don’t worry if you know nothing about genetics. There are tutorials to show you what to do. This online game was developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University.
Old Weather invites us to transcribe 100 year old ship logs.
Military naval vessels record the weather six times a day. Because ships move around, we can think of them as de facto mobile weather stations. Britain’s National Archives has scanned the logs of 250 ships from the extended First World War period, from 1913 to 1923. Old Weather asks us to help transcribe these 250,000 log pages. What we find there will help scientists to understand what the weather was like 100 years ago. This reconstructed weather information may give us insight into climate change today.
Proofread pages for Project Gutenberg.
Since 1971, Project Gutenberg has devoted itself to digitizing books in the public domain, that is, those published before 1923. At first, volunteers transcribed books, retyping them into computers. Now, machines capture text via optical character recognition (OCR.) But these texts contain errors that are best caught by human eyes.
Here’s where you come in. Register at Project Gutenberg to compare the scanned text to the image of a page. “Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book…and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.” Project Gutenberg invites us all to join them in “preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use.”
Help scientists analyze our Milky Way.
Our local galaxy is big but our scientists are few. Can we help them to find the objects in our neighborhood Milky Way? Register for free at The Milky Way Project to examine infrared images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Mark bubbles, dark nebulae, “fuzzy red objects” (often the birthplace of stars) and “green knots.” Human brains are better than computers for noticing these things. So, put yours to work cataloging the sky.
Help scientists measure the snowpack with Snowtweets!
Richard Kelly, professor of geography at the University of Waterloo in Canada, wants to track climate change and predict the spring runoff but he needs your help. He says, “We’re asking people to really look around them when they’re outside and perhaps make a measurement of how much snow there is in their backyard, or on their way as they drive along. They can perhaps make an estimate of snow depth.”
Use Twitter to send a message about the snow, marking your tweet with the hashtag #snowtweets. Send the hashtag and your guess of the snow depth in centimeters or inches followed by your GPS coordinates or zip code. Your tweet should look like this:
#snowtweets 15 in. at 14226
Android and iPhone users can visit http://snowtweets.org/m to download the app for their smartphones.
Do your part to help the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo figure out the SWE (snow water equivalent) at various spatial scales and with different accuracies…with your Snowtweets!
The Internet Book of Life 