Games for science
Gamers solve problems that scientists have not coped with
Alfiya Yenikeeva, RIA Novosti
The amount of information that modern scientific instruments allow us to collect and store is so large that neither supercomputers nor scientists themselves can handle its processing. Ordinary enthusiasts come to the aid of researchers. When there are really a lot of them, they are capable of incredible discoveries. RIA Novosti talks about online projects whose participants have left a mark on science.
Fold the protein
A living cell functions thanks to an army of workhorses – proteins that it synthesizes itself. A protein that has just come off the assembly line looks like a thin and long molecular chain, which in the blink of an eye is folded in a strictly defined way. In scientific language, this is called "folding".
How a protein "knows" how to fold itself, and why this transformation occurs so quickly is one of the important questions of modern molecular biology.
Scientists have figured out the folding of simple proteins so far, the study of complex structures is in full swing. Since computer algorithms cannot cope with this task, the staff of the University of Washington (USA) created an online puzzle Foldit to use the help of the collective mind.
Fragment of the Foldit game
For more than ten years now, players from all over the world have been looking for the most optimal ways to fold a particular protein, and their solutions are subsequently rechecked on a supercomputer. Most Foldit users do not have a biochemical education, but their discoveries are quite worthy of a prestigious scientific award. So, in 2011, the players helped to decipher the crystal structure of the monkey virus that causes AIDS in wild primates. The task was available in the game for only three weeks, the optimal solution appeared on the tenth day. Not a bad result, considering that scientists have been struggling with this problem for a decade and a half.
Laptop across the galaxy
More than ten years and the Galaxy Zoo project, thanks to which astronomy enthusiasts help professional scientists to recognize objects in photographs taken by automatic telescopes. Since 2007, 15,000 project participants have viewed about a million images taken by the Apache Point Observatory Telescope in New Mexico (USA), the Hubble Telescope and the Victor Blanco Telescope installed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Each photo was studied by several users at once, and the final version of the classification was the one that coincided in 80 percent of cases.
The result of such a massive brainstorming in 2013 was the most complete astronomical catalog in the world at that time, including more than three hundred thousand galaxies. Four years later, data from the Galaxy Zoo website was included in the largest catalog for today, The Reference Catalog of galaxy Spectral Energy Distributions (RCSED), created by scientists from several universities, including Lomonosov Moscow State University. RCSED contains information about more than eight hundred thousand galaxies.
A few months ago, those who signed up for Galaxy Zoo had the opportunity to build their own galaxy. A new project, Galaxy Builder, was launched on the Zooniverse platform, which grew out of the original "galactic zoo". Its participants collect images of galaxies from different images. It is assumed that this will help astronomers better understand how these cosmic structures are formed.
The Russian MASTER robot telescope network, created by Vladimir Lipunov on the basis of the Moscow State University Traffic Police and operating in both hemispheres: in the Urals, Baikal, the Far East, the Caucasus, the Crimea, the Canaries, Argentina and South Africa, opens up larger prospects for amateur astronomers. The archive of images taken by the network's telescopes was given access to "seekers" – enthusiasts working at home literally over a cup of coffee. They often turn out to be co-authors of a scientific discovery. For example, in 2015, retired seeker Vladislav Shumkov discovered an exceptionally rare phenomenon - a new red star in the Andromeda nebula.
All - Russian Bird Census
The interactive map of the distribution of different bird species across Russia, which is being created by amateur ornithologists, has been in operation for 14 years.
Every year at the end of September, the "Union for the Protection of Birds of Russia" announces the days of bird watching. During this period (usually no longer than a week), volunteers record all the birds they meet and send this information to special coordination centers. The information received is analyzed and then published on the Internet.
The data for this year is still being processed by specialists, and in the near future the website of the "Union for the Protection of Birds of Russia" will post fresh information about all birds living in the country.
Bacteria fight!
Researchers from the Technical University of Madrid (Spain), fighting malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists have developed the so-called Internet diagnostics of these diseases, namely the online games MalariaSpot, MalariaSpot Bubbles and TuberSpot.
Fragment of the MalariaSpot game
Players analyze micrographs of blood samples, if we are talking about malaria plasmodia, or sputum, in the case of mycobacteria, and look for parasites in them. Of course, mistakes are inevitable, but, as practice has shown (and the games have been available for download on Android and iOS for two years), if you combine the results of different participants, the diagnosis turns out to be quite accurate.
Every year, more than ten million people get sick with malaria and tuberculosis in the world. Considering that it takes about half an hour for a specialist to make each diagnosis (it is necessary not only to detect parasites in the blood or sputum, but also to count their number), the results of the game are a serious help to medical workers.
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