Volunteers helping astronomers classify galaxies in an online project have identified an entirely new type of galaxy, which they dubbed “green pea” galaxies due to their resemblance to little green legumes floating in space. The citizen scientists who had noticed the oddities, and who came to call themselves the “Pea Corps” and the “Peas Brigade,” began to discuss the phenomena on an online forum, and soon enough professional astronomers with links to the project confirmed that the volunteers had found a never-before-seen type of galaxy.
Says astronomer Carolin Cardamone: “No one person could have done this on their own…. Even if we had managed to look through 10,000 of these images, we would have only come across a few Green Peas and wouldn’t have recognized them as a unique class of galaxies.” Of the one million galaxies that make up the image bank, the researchers found only 250 Green Peas [SPACE.com]. Cardamone and her colleagues wrote up the results, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Playing true to form, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is launching an ambitious, expensive effort using unorthodox tactics, but this time he’s taking on Parkinson’s research. In cooperation with the personal genetics testing company 23andMe, which was cofounded by Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, Brin is hoping to get 10,000 Parkinson’s patients to fill out online questionnaires and get their genomes scanned. To encourage participation, 23andMe will provide the DNA scan for $25, a fraction of the normal $399 price. Brin, who says he has an elevated risk of Parkinson’s, will contribute the bulk of the money for the study, although he declined to disclose the total costs.
Wojcicki says that getting full genetic information for so many patients could reveal genetic patterns to the disease, which has already been linked to a handful of genes. “We want to try and find out if there are other genetic variations that are associated with Parkinson’s or with rapid progression or slow progression,” said Wojcicki, in a telephone interview yesterday. “Also, why some people respond well to therapy, some people don’t, and some develop resistance faster” [Bloomberg].
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In a neat example of Internet-enabled “crowdsourcing,” the method of distributing a large task to many contributors, researchers are using an anti-spam program to get people to decipher damaged or faded texts, one word at a time. Chances are that if you’ve solved one of those distorted-word tests to secure an account with Facebook, Craigslist, or Ticketmaster, you’ve helped The New York Times inch a little closer to digitizing its entire print newspaper archive from 1851 to 1980 [CNET].
The program, known as reCAPTCHA, is widely used to ensure that humans, rather than spam bots, are commenting on blogs (including some of DISCOVER’s) and signing up for free email accounts. “More web sites are adopting reCAPTCHAs each day, so the rate of transcription keeps growing,” said [lead researcher Luis] von Ahn. “More than 4 million words are being transcribed every day. It would take more than 1,500 people working 40 hours a week at a rate of 60 words a minute to match our weekly output” [Telegraph]. The service is available for free to any site.
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