Physics with Portals

I’ve been at a conference for science education and communication the past few days, and this is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen since getting here.

It’s a Portal 2 builder that models physics lessons! If you’re a teacher, then get this into your physics classroom. If you’re a student, get your teacher to put this in your classroom.  

Nashville high school teacher Cameron Pittman has been working with Valve, the people behind Portal 2, to use their realistic physics models to teach students about mechanics and motion. Want to demonstrate parabolic motion? Build a room, pop a couple portals in the right place and get to flying.

There’s a ton of demo videos on Cameron’s website, so check ‘em all out. Man, this makes me want to go back to high school.

Bonus: There’s a way to use Skyrim to teach geology! Here’s the minerals of Skyrim:

Source: physicswithportals.com

EyeWire: You Play a Game, Scientists Map Neurons Everyone wins! You guys should really check out EyeWire, an online game that helps you map neurons without any knowledge of biology. It’s revolutionary neuroscience, harnessing the power of thousands of video gamers to do a job that supercomputers can barely do. EyeWire is a citizen science game created by MIT’s Sebastian Seung and friends (shout out to Amy from the Seung group for showing me this game!). Seung, famous for his work on the connectome (and the book of the same name), studies how mapping the nervous system’s connections help us define its true function. Understanding how our nervous system works requires knowing more than how one neuron works, we have to understand how they connect to each other to create larger networks.  In EyeWire, you tour through pattern-filled cubes, clicking colored blobs to help the software map the arms of J cells (that’s one above), a type of neuron in the retina whose connections are very poorly understood. It’s seriously addictive, and you’ll be making a real difference in our understanding of the brain. So why make a game? This kind of pattern recognition is very hard for computers to do. The human brain is amazingly adept at picking out patterns, far better than even our most powerful machines.  My only minor complaint is that its popularity is making gameplay a little slow this first week. The great I F*cking Love Science Facebook page helped crash their servers yesterday, which are now back up, but new players are only being allowed in a handful at a time. So follow EyeWire on Facebook to find out when you can sign up. You’ll be glad you did. I’m sure that the hordes of It’s Okay To Be Smart and other Tumblr science readers can crash the servers better than any Facebook page can, right? Game on!
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EyeWire: You Play a Game, Scientists Map Neurons

Everyone wins! You guys should really check out EyeWire, an online game that helps you map neurons without any knowledge of biology. It’s revolutionary neuroscience, harnessing the power of thousands of video gamers to do a job that supercomputers can barely do.

EyeWire is a citizen science game created by MIT’s Sebastian Seung and friends (shout out to Amy from the Seung group for showing me this game!). Seung, famous for his work on the connectome (and the book of the same name), studies how mapping the nervous system’s connections help us define its true function. Understanding how our nervous system works requires knowing more than how one neuron works, we have to understand how they connect to each other to create larger networks. 

In EyeWire, you tour through pattern-filled cubes, clicking colored blobs to help the software map the arms of J cells (that’s one above), a type of neuron in the retina whose connections are very poorly understood. It’s seriously addictive, and you’ll be making a real difference in our understanding of the brain.

So why make a game? This kind of pattern recognition is very hard for computers to do. The human brain is amazingly adept at picking out patterns, far better than even our most powerful machines. 

My only minor complaint is that its popularity is making gameplay a little slow this first week. The great I F*cking Love Science Facebook page helped crash their servers yesterday, which are now back up, but new players are only being allowed in a handful at a time. So follow EyeWire on Facebook to find out when you can sign up. You’ll be glad you did.

I’m sure that the hordes of It’s Okay To Be Smart and other Tumblr science readers can crash the servers better than any Facebook page can, right?

Game on!

Gaming Your Way Through a Relativistic Universe

Remember in Super Mario Brothers, how the music and time would speed up when you started running low on the clock? Well, here’s a new level of video game time-freakiness, all about relativity. 

Strange things happen to our perception of the universe when we travel close to the speed of light (you know, if we could travel close to the speed of light). Special relativity, as worked out by Einstein and others, gives us plenty of weirdness when it comes to our perception of time and distance at those extreme speeds. MIT’s Game Lab has developed a game that simulates that experience. It’s called A Slower Speed of Light.

The closer we get to the speed of light, time slows down for us relative to someone watching us (“time dilation”), light shifts to red and blue, and the lengths of things contract in the direction we are moving. Weirded out yet? Ethan Siegel has a pretty good explanation of all those strange effects.

In the game, the object is to collect these orbs. As you grab each one, the speed of light slows down a bit. That means that you get closer and closer to traveling at the speed of light, and the game shifts the visuals and your movement to give you an idea of what that might feel like. It is not unlike a relativistic drug trip.

The game is available for Mac and PC. Pause the Halo and give relativity a whirl. It’s a video game that Einstein would have approved of!

(via Discovery News)

Source: news.discovery.com

The Psychology Of Tetris

Tom Stafford writes at Mind Hacks on the strange psychology of why Tetris is so damn addictive, and how it scratches some natural human tendencies to make order out of chaos.

Tetris holds our attention by continually creating unfinished tasks. Each action in the game allows us to solve part of the puzzle, filling up a row or rows completely so that they disappear, but is also just as likely to create new, unfinished work. A chain of these partial-solutions and newly triggered unsolved tasks can easily stretch to hours, each moment full of the same kind of satisfaction as scratching an itch.

It’s a game that some have said has the potency of an addictive drug, and affects the mind so significantly that it can be used in PTSD therapy. Check out the full story at the link above to learn more about the brain’s desire to focus around goals, and how Tetris exploits that for simple, satisfying fun.

And then when you’re done, make sure you check out this amazing fully-playable LED Tetris jack-o-lantern!!!!

fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Played By Humans, Scored By Nature Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.  The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.  “We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.” “This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.” And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against. So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising! Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.
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fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Played By Humans, Scored By Nature Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.  The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.  “We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.” “This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.” And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against. So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising! Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.
Zoom Info
fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Played By Humans, Scored By Nature Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.  The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.  “We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.” “This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.” And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against. So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising! Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.
Zoom Info
fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Played By Humans, Scored By Nature Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.  The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.  “We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.” “This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.” And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against. So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising! Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.
Zoom Info

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Played By Humans, Scored By Nature

Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should. 

The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past. 

“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”

“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”

And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.

So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!

Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.

"I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result."

One of the most interesting Reddit threads I’ve seen in a while. Ever wondered what would happen if you allowed a game like Civilization II to continue into the year 3991 A.D? 

War. Eternal war, full of death and chaos, all over scarce resources and among three remaining global nations. Check out the whole post here, and start stocking canned goods. There’s even a subreddit dedicated to theories on how to bring peace to this game world!

Why have cheats disappeared from gaming? … an interesting Reddit conversation: Cheats were originally introduced as a debugging mechanism. You used them to test the game. Removing them was potentially a bit difficult - old games had a lot of interconnections, and removing the cheats could actually introduce bugs - as well as irrelevant. But the games back then were simple enough that you only needed half a dozen simple cheats in order to test everything, so this worked out great. I still could never beat Contra. (via truegaming)
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Why have cheats disappeared from gaming? … an interesting Reddit conversation:

Cheats were originally introduced as a debugging mechanism. You used them to test the game. Removing them was potentially a bit difficult - old games had a lot of interconnections, and removing the cheats could actually introduce bugs - as well as irrelevant. But the games back then were simple enough that you only needed half a dozen simple cheats in order to test everything, so this worked out great.

I still could never beat Contra.

(via truegaming)

Source: reddit.com

Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years By playing a game called Foldit, where players (often with no scientific background) try to fold protein structures into their likely structures, players have unlocked a key structure in the fight against HIV. By simply tweaking a chain of amino acids over and over until they get it to fold into a realistic, stable structure, these gamers were able to deduce the 3-D structure of a key protein in Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, a relative of HIV. Now that we know the structure, drugs may be designed to attack this key protein. So next time someone tells you to stop playing that game, open up Foldit and tell them you’re doing science! (via Discover Magazine)
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Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years

By playing a game called Foldit, where players (often with no scientific background) try to fold protein structures into their likely structures, players have unlocked a key structure in the fight against HIV.

By simply tweaking a chain of amino acids over and over until they get it to fold into a realistic, stable structure, these gamers were able to deduce the 3-D structure of a key protein in Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, a relative of HIV. Now that we know the structure, drugs may be designed to attack this key protein.

So next time someone tells you to stop playing that game, open up Foldit and tell them you’re doing science!

(via Discover Magazine)

Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com