Citizenscience projects Bay Area. Would you like to have a wetland at your school? SAVE THE FROGS! Is looking for a school within a two-hour drive of Berkeley, California, that would like to have a wetland. The wetland would be designed to help frogs and provide for outdoor education. It would be shallow, less than 18-inches deep in the middle, and have gradual slopes. Tom Biebighauser, a Wetland Ecologist would design and oversee the construction of the wetland. He has built over 1,600 wetlands in 20 states and 2 Canadian provinces. Application: If you are interested in having a wetland, please ask the Principal of your school to send the following information to tombiebighauser@gmail.com by April 28, 2014: 1) Name, phone number, and e-mail 2) School name and address 3) Google Earth image showing the school and school property 4) The area available for building the wetland should be circled on a Google Earth image.
Timeline: Tom Biebighauser and Dr. Please contact tombiebighauser@gmail.com if you have any questions. Science 2.0 | Home. Citizen Cyberscience (CyberSciCentre) SETI@home. Stardust@Home. Rosetta@home. Fluorescent proteins designed from scratch Congrats to all Rosetta@home volunteers who contributed to a recent report in Nature describing the design of a completely artificial fluorescent beta-barrel protein. As described by one of the main authors, Anastassia, in this forum post: The paper presents many “firsts” in computational protein design. It is the first de novo design of the beta-barrel fold (one of the most described folds in the past 35 years, yet mysterious until now). It is also the first de novo design of a protein tailored to bind a small-molecule, which requires very high accuracy in the placement of side chains on protein backbones assembled from scratch.
Additionally, we could show that these new proteins could fold and function as expected in vivo! Thanks to all the Rosetta@home volunteers who contributed to the validation of our designed proteins and binding sites. Here is the link to the IPD webpage that contains a copy of the paper. Rosetta 4.07 released ... more. Foldit Solve Puzzles for Science.
Citizen Science Alliance. Citizen Science Alliance. Citizen science: People power. Gaming the System: Video Gamers Help Researchers Untangle Protein Folding Problem. What if the brainpower used playing video games could be channeled toward something more productive, such as helping scientists solve complex biological problems? A team of biochemists and computer scientists from the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle now reports that they have successfully tapped into this human problem-solving potential.
Their competitive online game "Foldit," released in 2008, enlists the help of online puzzle-solvers to help crack one of science's most intractable mysteries—how proteins fold into their complex three-dimensional forms. The "puzzles" gamers solve are 3-D representations of partially folded proteins, which players manipulate and reshape to achieve the greatest number of points. The scores are based on biochemical measures of how well the players' final structure matches the way the protein appears in nature. Understanding how proteins achieve their optimal, functional 3-D form is no simple task.
So what's next for Foldit? Video: Crowdsourcing can help solve scientific problems | Science. Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures. Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community. Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game. According to a news feature on Foldit, the project arose from an earlier distributed computing effort called Rosetta@home. This is typically an energy minimization problem. It sounds simple, but with anything more than a short chain of amino acids, there are a tremendous number of potential configurations to be sampled in 3D space, which can bring powerful computers to their knees.
Starting with algorithms, ending with brains. NASA-funded game aims to make science more appealing. Last week a curious, free release popped up on Steam: Moonbase Alpha, a NASA-funded game where up to six players can team up in order to save a near-future Lunar base crippled by a meteor strike. The game is just the first release from NASA's Learning Technologies program, which aims to help raise interest in the space program through gaming. Ars spoke with Daniel Laughlin, project manager of Learning Technologies, to learn more about the game and what we can expect to see in the future. The game was codeveloped by Army Game Studio and Virtual Heroes, two of the leading developers of "serious games. " And according to Laughlin, NASA's decision to move into the game space was influenced a great deal by the success of the studios' previous releases. "The project was inspired in part by America's Army," Laughlin told Ars.
Though development of the game didn't start until last year, Laughlin actually began researching the prospect of using games as an educational tool back in 2004. World view: Not by experts alone. BOINC. ECAST Network. ScienceBlogs. Science Blogging Aggregated. ScienceBlogs, we have a problem | Science. Much consternation over at the home of science blogging, ScienceBlogs. The forum for the brilliant Orac, Pharyngula, Molecule of the Day, and countless other insightful, funny and informative blogs has decided upon a bizarre new strategy in sourcing new posts. As of yesterday, the platform will host a new blog written by food giant PepsiCo, all about the company's specialist subject of refreshing sugary drinks and their benefits for dental and dietary health.
Sorry, no, PepsiCo's scientific staff will be writing about nutrition on the new Food Frontiers blog. I'll give you a moment to get back on your chair. ScienceBlogs editor, Evan Lerner, writes: As part of this partnership, we'll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. A corporate-sponsored blog has no place in ScienceBlogs. Shame on you. Shame on the ScienceBlogs management.
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