North Is..⇡

Obama is giving the science community something we’ve been desperately clawing at over the last eight years: an ear for the sciences. It will be amazing to see what the first pro-science administration can do in today’s ultra connected world. I mean come on, YouTube has been around, why has Bush done ANYTHING with it yet? no Facebook page?

12/20/08 President-elect Obama’s Weekly Address

From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process,

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Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us.

Obama has already proven his ability to tame the beast that is the World Wide Web, let’s see if he can be just as visionary elsewhere. Maybe it’s just me, but but does  anybody else find it ironic that we’re all so excited about science, even more so because of the Bush administration being so against it?

Fold.it is a new project in the growing genre of human computation games, also known as crowd-sourcing. That is games that `trick’ us into doing useful computation while playing them. Fold.it uses the human brain to predict patterns in protein folding, something that is very difficult for a computer to do.

From their site:

We’re collecting data to find out if humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

For more on the science behind protein folding and how humans can help here is their about page.

One previous example of this is the Google Image Labeler game. A game in which users tag random images from Google image searches. In turn the information is used to make the search more accurate.

“An Israeli Inventor has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of compressed air tanks. This new invention will use the relatively small amounts of air that already exist in water to supply oxygen to both scuba divers and submarines.”

The methodology is actually quite like how a fish does it. Fish do not break apart water molecules to get the oxygen out, rather they filter the water through their gills which extract the small amount of air saturated into the water.

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