Solve Puzzles for Science | Foldit. Zooniverse - Real Science Online. Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel. Egypt Exploration Society / Oxford Imaging Papyri Project A 3rd-century papyrus fragment contains a snippet of text from a non-canonical Christian gospel. By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News Scientists are recruiting thousands of armchair archaeologists to help them decipher a "lost" gospel and other fragments of texts from ancient Egypt. The Ancient Lives project draws upon the same type of people power that drives citizen-science projects such as Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters, Foldit and EteRNA. Oxford University launched Ancient Lives just a couple of days ago, but project leader Chris Lintott told me that more than 400,000 papyrus images have already been served up as of today.
Deluge of documentsThat's the kind of participation Ancient Lives will need in order to cope with the deluge of documents from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. University of Minnesota physicist Lucy Fortson, another project leader, said the fragments are completely out of sequence. Update for 5:30 p.m. Join a worldwide planet search. By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News Astronomers have been looking for alien worlds for more than 15 years, and now you too can join the search. The Planet Hunters project is the latest citizen-science campaign organized by the crew at Zooniverse. Hundreds of thousands of computer users are already helping Zooniverse classify galaxies through Galaxy Zoo, and analyze lunar craters through Moon Zoo. This new project aims to recruit users to check data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission, which is expected to detect hundreds of Earthlike planets in a region of the constellation Cygnus. Kepler's science team detects planets by looking for the slight dimming in a star's light that's caused when a planetary disk passing over.
More than 500 planets have been detected beyond our solar system, and Kepler is just getting started. The Planet Hunters project is not tied directly to the Kepler mission, but will serve to complement the studies being done by the Kepler team. Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists. Last updated 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases. "This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.
"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. Newton's Alchemy. By Bill Newman Posted 11.15.05 NOVA Historian of science Bill Newman says that Isaac Newton's alchemical notebooks are like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. But this puzzle is no child's play—more like an enigma wrapped in a mystery riddled with a number of misleading clues.
With Newman's help, NOVA has "decoded" a page from one of Newton's 300-year-old manuscripts. Launch Interactive He kept it hidden, but was Isaac Newton's alchemical work truly scandalous? To orient yourself to the bewildering world of 17th-century alchemy, we recommend you first read our interview with Bill Newman before plunging into the interactive manuscript above. A Guide to the Alchemical Manuscript This document, which Newton likely wrote in the mid-1670s, is part of an eight-page manuscript now housed at Yale University.* The manuscript contains extracts from Newton's favorite alchemist, the American writer George Starkey (1628-1665).
Bill Newman is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. Miracle Planet - Asteroid Impact Simulation. Math Genius Solves 100 Year Old Problem, Then Refuses Million Dollar Prize. The Poincare conjecture was a seemingly unsolvable theorem that was first proposed in 1904. Dealing with a branch of spatial mathematics called topology, the theorem sought to prove that any shape without a hole can be formed into a sphere.
Sounds simple enough, right? Tell that to the math world, which, for over a century, struggled to prove the elusive conjecture even possible, inadvertently turning it into one of the community’s Holy Grails. But Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman published two proofs of the theorem back in 2002 and 2003, and according to The Utopianist, it wasn’t until last year that a team of advanced mathematicians at the Clay Mathematical Institute (CMI) finally proved his results valid. His reward? One million dollars and the Fields Medal, or the math world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. “Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity. So how did he solve the problem? In his words: (via The Utopianist, Digital Journal) Understanding Genetics: Human Health and the Genome. Medicines against HIV work by gumming up some part of the infection process.
If the virus can't get into cells, or can't make new virus, then the infection would be stopped. Can blocking CCR5 stop HIV? Scientists are working hard to find out. Drugs are being developed that barricade the CCR5 receptor so HIV can't use it. However, there are many things that could go wrong. A drug to block CCR5 may have bad side effects and make people sicker. But blocking CCR5 is still unlikely to be a miracle cure. Most living things carry the instructions for making themselves in DNA. To make new virus, this RNA has to first be copied into DNA. The reverse transcriptase of HIV is very sloppy when it copies the genetic instructions. Some of these viruses might not work at all. So a form of evolution occurs -- Darwin's 'survival of the fittest'. This is how the virus becomes resistant to drugs--most viral particles are stopped by a drug but some have a mutation that lets them survive and reproduce.
SDO_Earth_scale-EDIT2.jpg from space.com. Absolute Zero | A Sense of Scale. By Glenn Elert Posted 01.08.08 NOVA At roughly minus 460°F, absolute zero is abysmally cold, yet at least we can imagine it. Being only a few hundred degrees below zero, it's in the realm of something we can put our minds around. This is not true of the opposite of absolute zero, the theoretical highest possible temperature. In conventional physics, this is approximately 100 million million million million million degrees. In this interactive, get a taste of temperatures from absolute zero to absolute hot, and see why, for instance, even the core of the sun is relatively "chilly" compared to what many physicists believe the temperature of the universe was an instant after the Big Bang.
Launch Interactive Travel from absolute zero to what may be the highest temperature of all. This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Absolute Zero. Glenn Elert is Research Coordinator and Webmaster for the Physical Science Department of Midwood High School at Brooklyn College. Images.