Michael Graham Richard

Note: This was originally published on a page under the “Information” section in the sidebar, but because I realize that many people might miss it - including those reading through the RSS feed - I’ve decided to re-publish it as a post.

I’m a big fan of distributed computing. I think it’s a very elegant way to give scientists access to large quantities of computing power that would otherwise be wasted.

A good primer on the subject can be found here: How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity

What if some of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs (and 250 million households with broadband Internet) could be linked to assist scientists in solving critical real world problems? This is exactly what humanitarian grid computing is about!

Donate your computer’s idle CPU time to humanitarian non-profit scientific research projects. Help find cures for diseases like cancer, AIDS, diabetes, MS, Alzheimer, or help predict the earth’s climate change, or advance science e.g. search for gravitational waves, help CERN build its latest particle accelerator or Berkeley search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Project I currently support

• Rosetta@Home (protein prediction and design - join my team here)

Other projects that I like

• Orbit@Home (I can’t crunch data because it’s still in development — see this post for more info about Asteroids and Near Earth Objects)
• ClimatePrediction.net (climate models - when I have a faster computer, I’ll definitely support it)
• BOINC Simap (public database of pre-calculated protein similarities. I used to crunch for this project, but now that the bottleneck is the amount of data to process and not the amount of computing power available, there is little point in me donating CPU cycles.)
• Einstein@Home (search for gravity waves from spinning neutron stars)
• Predictor@Home (predict protein structure from protein sequence — took a long hiatus, but is coming back)
• Folding@Home (understanding protein folding — I like it, but it is so popular that your CPU cycles probably make a bigger marginal difference elsewhere, like Rosetta@Home)

How to help

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, better known as BOINC, is the platform used by most projects (including all of those I listed above).

To get started there are three steps:

1. Choose projects
2. Download and run BOINC software
3. Enter the project URLs, your email address, and password.

If you need more details, see this BOINC help page.

Happy data crunching!

An artist’s impression of a planet in orbit around a red dwarf. Public domain image created by NASA.

A multi-national team of Swiss, French and Por­tu­guese sci­en­tists have made a very important discovery: The first potentially habitable planet outside of our solar system.

The newly discovered extrasolar planet is the smallest yet discovered. It is estimated to have a radius 50% bigger than the Earth, so gravity on it would be about twice as strong as it is here, and it orbits a red dwarf called Gliese 581 which is 20.40 light years away (relatively close to us) in the constellation Libra.

The exoplanet is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun and so its year - a full orbit around the star - is only 13 Earth days long. But the good news is that since the red dwarf is “smaller [one third of the mass] and cool­er than the Sun, the plan­et nev­ertheless would lie in its hab­it­a­ble zone—the re­gion around a star with suit­a­ble tem­pe­r­a­tures for liq­uid wa­ter.”

Av­er­age tem­pe­r­a­tures on this “supe­r-Earth” lie be­tween 0 and 40 de­grees Cel­si­us (32 to 104 de­grees Fahren­heit), “and wa­ter would thus be liq­uid,” said Sté­phane Udry of Switz­er­land’s Ge­ne­va Ob­serv­a­to­ry, lead au­thor of a pa­pe­r re­port­ing the re­sult. “Mod­els pre­dict that the plan­et should be ei­ther rock­y—like our Earth—or cov­ered with oceans,” he added. [...]

“Be­cause of its tem­pe­r­a­ture and rel­a­tive prox­im­i­ty, this plan­et will most prob­a­bly be a very im­por­tant tar­get of the fu­ture space mis­sions ded­i­cat­ed to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treas­ure map of the Uni­verse, one would be tempted to mark this plan­et with an X.”

All of this thanks to what seems to be an amazing instrument:

The find was pos­si­ble thanks to an in­stru­ment known as a spec­tro­graph on the Eu­ro­pe­an South­ern Ob­serv­a­to­ry’s 3.6-meter tel­e­scope at La Silla, Chil­e, ac­cord­ing to the group. The in­s­tru­ment, called the High Ac­cu­ra­cy Ra­di­al Ve­loc­i­ty for Plan­e­tary Search­er, is touted as one of the most suc­cess­ful tools for de­tecting exo­pla­n­ets to date.

The in­stru­ment meas­ured wig­gles in the star’s mo­tion cor­re­spond­ing to ve­loc­i­ty changes of just two to three me­ters per sec­ond—the speed of a brisk walk, ac­cord­ing to the Ge­ne­va Ob­serv­a­to­ry’s Mi­chel May­or, prin­ci­pal in­ves­ti­ga­tor for the in­stru­ment. Giv­en the re­sults so far, “Earth-mass plan­ets around red dwarfs are with­in reach” of dis­cov­ery, he pre­dicted.

The ar­row marks the ap­prox­i­mate lo­ca­tion of the red dwarf star Gliese 581 with re­spect to the con­stel­la­tion Li­bra vi­si­ble in the south­ern sky. Image credit: World-Science.net

Sources:

• Distant planet judged possibly habitable
• First habitable Earth like planet outside Solar System discovered

The universe is mostly empty, but not quite. Asteroids, also called minor planets or planetoids, float around and can potentially be dangerous for the Earth. Just looking at a map of the asteroids in the solar system should be enough to convince most people that we are not as alone in our corner of space as we sometimes might think.

A study on asteroids from 2002 said:

Asteroids in our Solar System may be more numerous than previously thought, according to the first systematic search for these objects performed in the infrared, with ESA’s Infrared Space Observatory, ISO. The ISO Deep Asteroid Search indicates that there are between 1.1 million and 1.9 million ’space rocks’ larger than 1 kilometre in diameter in the so-called ‘main asteroid belt’, about twice as many as previously believed.

Don’t panic, there’s this reassuring sentence:

However, astronomers think it is premature to revise current assessments of the risk of the Earth being hit by an asteroid.

But what comes right after it reveals how problematic things can be:

Despite being in our own Solar System, asteroids can be more difficult to study than very distant galaxies. With sizes of up to one thousand kilometres in diameter, the brightness of these rocky objects may vary considerably in just a few minutes. They move very quickly with respect to the stars - they have been dubbed ‘vermin of the sky‘ because they often appear as trails on long exposure images. This elusiveness explains why their actual number and size distribution remains uncertain. Most of the almost 40,000 asteroids catalogued so far (1) orbit the Sun forming the ‘main asteroid belt’, between Mars and Jupiter, too far to pose any threat to Earth. However, space-watchers do keep a closer eye on another category of asteroids, the ‘Near Earth Asteroids’ or ‘NEAs’, which are those whose orbits cross, or are likely to cross, that of our planet.

Though the asteroid belt itself, being relatively far from Earth, is not directly a problem (the inner edge of it is farther than Mars’ orbit, which is itself at half the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or 0.5 Astronomical Unit), it is important to better understand it because that’s where most of the “Near Earth Asteroids” (NEAs) or “Near Earth Objects” (NEOs) come from, and those share the same characteristics as belt asteroids (elusive “vermin of the sky”).

most NEA are believed to be former main belt asteroids. In the main belt there are four ’special’ regions where Jupiter’s gravitational influence is especially disruptive; originally, most asteroids currently known as NEA suffered collisions which resulted in them ending up in one of those four key regions, and because of Jupiter’s gravitational influence their orbits quickly evolved into Earth-crossing orbits. Therefore, by studying the asteroids near these so-called ’source regions’ in the main belt astronomers can learn about NEA. About 500 NEAs have been found so far*, and none of them pose any threat to Earth in this century.

* The study above was published in 2002. According to this NASA page, the number in 2002 was 523, but in 2007 (so far, up to April) it is up to 707 known “large” (one kilometer of diameter or larger) Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs).

The total number of known NEAs was 2165 at the end of 2002 and 4647 in April 2007. Here is a graph of the data from 1980 to November 2006:

Another interesting page on the NASA site is the NEO Earth Close Approaches page. It shows the recent and upcoming “close approaches” with the date, the miss distance (calculated in Astronomical Units, one being 149,597,870.691 kilometers, and “lunar distances”, one being 384,000 kilometers), the estimated diameter of the object, and the velocity of the NEO relative to the Earth’s (in kilometer per second).

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