Astronomers want you… to help them match pictures of cosmic collisions, which are known as “galactic mergers.” Studying these mergers could explain why the universe has the mix of galaxy types – from those with wound-up spiral arms to compact balls of stars – that it does. And it turns out that the human eye is much better than a computer at matching up images of real mergers with randomly-selected images of simulated mergers [SPACE.com]. So naturally, astronomers want to enlist the eyes of Internet users to help them.
The website, Galaxy Zoo Mergers, features a new game that bears (it must be said) only a mild resemblance a Vegas slot machine, with a real galactic merger image in the middle and eight randomly selected images of simulated mergers in the slots around it. Players pick out the best matches and can even manipulate the number of stars they see or an image’s orientation to make a better match. Says researcher Chris Lintott: “By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated possibilities and selecting only the very best matches, they are helping to build up a profile of what kinds of factors are necessary to create the galaxies we see in the universe around us – and, hopefully, having fun, too” [SPACE.com].
This is the latest project from Galaxy Zoo to rely on crowdsourcing. Over the past two years, Galaxy Zoo has enlisted 250,000 Internet users to classify hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – an effort that so far has resulted in 15 scientific papers, either submitted or published [MSNBC]. This new project will focus on 3,000 merger images, including some new ones taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The researchers say their attempts to understand the dynamics of a galactic merger is like trying to understand a car crash– they hope to find out what caused it, and what the final outcome will be for the galaxies involved.
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Image: Galaxy Zoo
With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.
The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)
By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].
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Image: JPL / Microsoft
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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