Botchandango.com

galaxyzoo.org

Now this is a really worthwhile 'time killer' if you have a good eye, an interest in astronomy and a spare few minutes every now and again.

Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.

Using a simple but nicely designed website the volunteer is presented with one of a million images stored on a computer waiting to be seen for the first time. The image is then classified according to some basic properties at just the click of a single button.

I heard about this on the radio this morning and signed up straight away.... unfortunately I believe many others did too as the site is currently timing out when trying to serve up images for analysis. Still, I went through the tutorial and passed the simple trial run (correctly classify a minimum of 8 out of 15 images) and will just have to wait a little longer to try it out for real. This always seems to happen with interesting websites that are announced in this way... I seem to remember the same thing happening when the 1901 (?) Census data was first made available.

The BBC story covering this can be found here.

5-SB

Yet another example of real life becomming strangely like something out of a William Gibson novel. Smart Drugs. I read this story today after seeing a post on slashdot, the first thing that came to mind was the drug 5-SB and the character Laney from the 'bridge' trilogy. After being subjected as an adolescent to this drug in clinical tests carried out in an orphanage Laney becomes in later life a superb quantatative analyst but also a homicidal stalker.

Going Up..

Now this sounds like something straight out of a science fiction novel, but there is an American company who are developing (and plan to have operational in 15 years) a Space Elevator. This would be a permanent cable from earth which extends out into space with a mass of some kind at the end in geosynchronus orbit to maintain the tension. Once the cable is in place it is then just a matter of having vehicles that can climb up and down the cable to the release objects into various orbits or, if from the very end of the cable, into space at very high speeds.

I am currently reading the third book in the Nights Dawn science fiction trilogy by Peter Hamilton. In these books, the Earth of the future has several of these elevators in place around the equator to cut down on the amount of polution caused by rocket traffic between the ground and orbit. If Liftport can get one of these space elevators operational, I think that it will mark a significant step forward for space travel and exploration. The relative reductions in cost and energy required to put objects into orbit or further should allow more money and effort to be spent in doing something useful at the destination rather than being used up mainly in the act of getting there.

Latest Science Award

Who is the most influential (fictional) on-screen scientist? This question was posed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in a survey carried out on the BBC website as part of this years Festival of Science. The result of the poll? it was a suprise win for Dr Bunsen Honeydew and his faithul assistant Beaker. Personally I would have voted for Professor Frink but it's nice to see that the older generation of fictional scientist are not forgotten. You can read the full story here.