Crowd-sourced science – Part 1: Participate in international science projects without lifting a finger

The vastness of our Universe and the multitude of fascinating objects that make it up have held my fancy for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I always wished I could participate in big science projects, in some capacity. Modern technology allows me to come pretty close.

In this two-part post, I would like to give a brief overview of just some of these projects. In part one, we look at those that involve passive participation on our behalf — the donation of spare computing time on our personal computers.

Modern computers are incredibly powerful, capable of billions of operations each second. Scientists in various fields are interested in using distributed computing to harness the processing power of thousands of computers around the world. Several computers join forces to act as a single supercluster that performs complex calculations and runs intricate simulations in relatively short periods of time, tasks that would be enormously expensive for a single organisation to undertake.

LHC@home
Though being the object of just one of the many searches being conducted at the LHC, the Higgs boson became a household name when the machine first began colliding protons in 2008. The search for the Higgs boson, for example, is complicated by the fact that signs of its production in the aftermath of particle collisions are similar to the signs of various run-of-the-mill and well-understood phenomena. So, physicists must run simulations to know what patterns are expected from known phenomena. Any deviation from these predictions could be the sign of something previously unobserved.

Volunteers of the LHC@home project will in fact donate their computers’ spare processing power to run these simulations. By installing a virtualisation tool and a collaboration client, anyone in the world can attach their computer to the project. Each volunteer can decide under what conditions the software is allowed to run and also what amount of CPU time it is allowed to use.

Folding@home
To perform their assorted functions in roles ranging from enzymes to anti-bodies, the proteins in our body must fold into specific shapes. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s and many cancers are believed to arise due to a misfolding of proteins. The Folding@home project has been running since 2000, performing simulations to better understand how the proteins fold into their useful shapes and how diseases might be caused by misfolding.

After the publication of a research paper analysing the raw data, the data will be made accessible via the Folding@home website and will be used by other scientists. At the time of writing, 95 papers have already been published by the scientists behind Folding@home.

If you are always using your computer(s) but have a Sony PS3 just lying about, be sure to hook up the gaming console to the project as versions 1.6 and above are capable of running the Folding@home software.

theSkyNet
Astronomy has come lightyears, if you will forgive my obvious if not exactly stellar attempt at a joke, since the days of the humble handheld optical telescope. Today’s astronomers rely on searches for new objects in a wide range of wavelengths. These searches, such as the radio wavelength searches to be conducted by those behind theSkyNet, often rely on arrays of telescopes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope_array] to collect data and computers to analyse the data.

By joining theSkyNet, volunteers will participate in searches for new stars and galaxies, discoveries that will no doubt contribute towards a better understanding of the physics which governs our Universe.

Each of these projects has individual and team leaderboards and there is healthy competition among the many volunteers, all with a direct benefit to science. When you do join these projects, be sure to get your friends to join and set up your own leagues.

There are several other scientific endeavours in which you could participate passively, a few of which are compiled in this list by Discovery Magazine.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at projects that allow you to dive right into scientific data and even make discoveries of your own. (Just as I finish writing this piece, I’ve come across the news that “Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years”. Truly exciting stuff!)