ECAST Network Galaxy Zoo: Hubble Citizens in Space Lynx Cub Payload Carrier Being Developed at Texas A&M College Station, Texas – A new payload carrier promises to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space for small scientific and education payloads. The Lynx Cub Payload Carrier was announced today by the United States Rocket Academy. The Lynx Cub Carrier will fly on the XCOR Lynx space plane, now under construction at the Mojave Air and Space Port, and carry up to 12 experiments on each flight. “The Lynx Cub Payload Carrier is a versatile system that installs in the Lynx cabin, behind the pilot’s seat, allowing small experiments to be carried as secondary payloads on any Lynx flight,” said United States Rocket Academy chairman Edward Wright. Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, will fly the Lynx Cub Carrier on 10 Lynx missions beginning in late 2014 or early 2015. “XCOR is pleased to welcome this new payload carrier to the Lynx family,” said Khaki Rodway, XCOR Director of Payload Sales and Operations.
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?
Solve Puzzles for Science | Foldit Amateur Research Initiative - Introduction Welcome to the Lowell Amateur Research Initiative (LARI) home page. The LARI program hopes to engage the ever-growing and technically sophisticated amateur astronomy community in some exciting research projects with Lowell astronomers. A passionate researcher, Percival Lowell always sought to communicate new ideas and the joy of astronomy research to the public. In that same spirit, LARI brings together professional and amateur astronomers in a way that affords interested amateurs an opportunity to participate in cutting-edge research and potentially make significant contributions to science. Amateurs can help Lowell astronomers in their work and help create dedicated research teams. Currently, Lowell astronomers are conducting several projects that would benefit from the participation of amateur astronomers. And now, get started by perusing our amateur research options. For more information, please contact LARI Manager Samantha Thompson at sthompson@lowell.edu or 928.233.3233
BOINC New App Helps NASA Keep Track of Meteoroids New App Helps NASA Keep Track of Meteoroids Dec. 13, 2011: Surprising but true: Every day, on average, more than 40 tons of meteoroids strike our planet. Most are tiny specks of comet dust that disintegrate harmlessly high up in Earth's atmosphere, producing a slow drizzle of meteors in the night sky. Bigger chunks of asteroid and comet debris yield dozens of nightly fireballs around the globe. Some are large enough to pepper the ground with actual meteorites. With so much "stuff" zeroing in on our planet, NASA could use some help keeping track of it all. Enter the Meteor Counter--a new iPhone app designed to harness the power of citizen scientists to keep track of meteoroids. "Using our app, people from all walks of life can contribute to authentic NASA research," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, which sponsored the project. Whenever you go outside for a bit of stargazing, take your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with you, advises Cooke. Author:Dr.
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. That project used what has become the standard approach for home-based scientific work: a screensaver that provided a graphical frontend to a program that uses spare processor time to solve weighty scientific problems. This is typically an energy minimization problem. Starting with algorithms, ending with brains
Andromeda Project About PHAT The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. For a hundred years, Andromeda (also known by its Messier Catalog identifier, M31) has played an important role in shaping our view of the Universe. In the early 1920's, Edwin Hubble's observations of Andromeda confirmed for the first time that galaxies lie outside of the Milky Way, and that Andromeda must contain billions of stars. Today, Andromeda is a template for understanding how spiral galaxies form and evolve. The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) survey (public webpage here) opens a new window on Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy with the PHAT coverage footprint overlaid (top). Hunting for Stellar Clusters Star clusters are collections of hundreds to millions of stars that were born at the same time from the same cloud of gas. Star clusters vary greatly in terms of mass, size, age, and local environment. Distant Galaxies Peeking Through Andromeda's Stars
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." 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. "The US is facing a crisis in technical fields," explained Laughlin. And, according to Laughlin, the success of Moonbase Alpha could have a big affect on the development of the MMO.
SETI@home