The article leads with the example of Rytis Slatkevicius, an MBA student by day, who, in 2006 when he was ony 18, had assembled the world’s largest database of prime numbers — those which are only divisible by themselves and one. He had done this by harnessing the spare processing power of computers belonging to thousands of prime-number enthusiasts, using the internet. These days professional mathematicians collaborate with him, using the power of his volunteer computing network, PrimeGrid, to address significant problems.

There are nearly 100 science projects using such volunteer computing. Like PrimeGrid, most are based on an open-source software platform called BOINC with volunteer computing. Many address topical themes, such as modelling climate change  with ClimatePrediction.net, developing drugs for AIDS with FightAids@home, or simulating the spread of malaria with MalariaControl.net.

This volunteer computing approach is also facilitating fundamental science projects. For example,  Einstein@Home analyzes data from gravitational wave detectors, MilkyWay@Home simulates galactic evolution, and LHC@home studies accelerator beam dynamics.

These projects leverage a sense of online community. BOINC provides enthusiastic volunteers with message boards to chat with each other and share information about the science behind the project. This is strikingly similar to the sort of social networking that happens on websites such as Facebook, but with a scientific twist. BOINC also provides a credit system, which measures how much processing each volunteer has done — turning the project into an online game where they can compete as individuals or in teams. Again, there are obvious analogies with popular online games such as Second Life.

This is real science, being done by all sorts of real people collaborating together across geographic and political boundaries; people motivated by a sense of enquiry and wonder whose interactions are made possible by social networking.

Learning circles involve groups of students from a number of schools. The groups use each other as collaborative resources to investigate and analyse issues related to the project topic, in this case the theme was ‘One World’. They commit to produce a report which could be video, powerpoint, poetry, a website or anything else that can be published online.

Nothwithstanding these problems, some of the student groups got stuck into the project and have now produced their reports. You can see these at the project site Look out for the obese giraffe – brilliant! The reports – video and powerpoint – show how the kids brought together a number of scientific themes that illustrate how interdependent we are on this fragile Earth.

This is, of course, bollox.

This post is prompted by clearing my office desk. In the process of doing so I found a bit of the Guardian letters page which I had torn out, months (years?) ago. It’s not dated. The fragment has a letter from Prof. Lewis Lesley. I think this is so relevant that I’ll repeat most of it in full. After a couple of comments about the stunning cost and staggering waste represented by the Thorp plant at Sellafield, he says…

“… All of these false starts miss one vital point. Uranium is a fossil fuel. There are no uranium reserves in Britain.

Mining, refining and transporting uranium generates significant environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emssions, which need 10 years of nuclear generation to balance. As a scarce commodity, uranium prices will rise to follow oil. Noone knows wht to do with the waste, except make weapons of mass destruction.  For 10% of the tax money spent without results on nuclear power, we could have retrofitted 100% of our housing stock to a zero-carbon standard and saved 40% of our energy consumption.”

We’re cascading towards a recession and unemployment is rising. Wouldn’t spending money in this way, creating thousands of relatively low-tech jobs, be preferable to investing huge sums of money in a technology that has consistently failed to perform, consistently created highly hazardous and long-lasting waste, which will employ a very small number of individuals many of which will have to be recruited from overseas (because we don’t turn out enough engineers in the UK) and for which the financial value of construction and operation will pass overseas?

The bad thing was seeing the Windows blue screen of death when I started my pc this morning. Fortunately the beast worked when I rebooted it, so most of the day has been spent backing everything up and failing to find out why several error messages have started to appear. I thought I’d better write this before I press the off button ‘cos, based on past experience, it won’t work thereafter.

The good things…

1. Finding out the Ed Milliband has announced that the Government will introduce a clause into the forthcoming energy bill that will provide for a guaranteed feed-in tariff. If you don’t know what that is, it means that folk who install renewable energy generation capacity can get a decent price for any surplus energy that they export to the grid. This is standard practice around Europe and accounts for why Spain, Portugal and Germany are doing so well in developing renewable energy sources. In fact Germany is doing so well that it will apparently take the UK 150 years to catch up at present rates. So, with a proper feed-in tariff we may now catch up with them in about 80 years instead <sigh>. And maybe now there will be an incentive to start exploiting some of the technology we’ve developed here in the UK instead of exporting it for others’ benefit, like Pelamis.
2. Finding out from Andrew Dean at Exeter’s Marchmont Observatory that NASA has launched eClips. It’s yet another wonderful resource to help convey the fascination of science.
3. Listening to the news and hearing that Ed Balls has had the common sense to abandon KS3 SATS. Hurrah and about time too. KS2 SATS next please and be quick about it.

Oh yes, and there was a small step forward here in Bristol a couple of weeks ago when the wonderful Mary Gowers of iEARN UK initiated a learning circle as an initiative towards Science City Bristol (not that the project merits a mention on their website!) Teams of students from 5 local schools will be working together online to undertake an enquiry-based collaborative learning project.

Things are looking up… Shame about the global economy.

The have a facebook group too – look for UK Science and Society Consultation – join it and tell them what you think.

Maybe you could put in a plug for the Rocard Report, which advocated enquiry based learning as the only hope for European science; I’m not sure anyone in DIUS has read it.

( I have a feeling that I would like a simpler name for the Department. How about ‘DoQ’ – The Department of  Qualifications. I’m not sure that their priority is understanding science, rather it’s more about getting as many people as possible to get as many qualifications as possible )

There are some fascinating videos here -  exploding  methane bubbles,  recombinant  DNA,  dandelions opening/closing in response to sunlight: wonderful. I wish I had thought of it first. Surely there’s an opportunity here for a major technology company to sponsor a set of videos explaining some core technological concepts, maybe around computing, for example. This would provide them with marketing profile whilst doing something useful to contribute to improving the lamentable state of UK science education.

At the other event I was exposed to GoScience, a local (to me) company that’s developed an underwater sensing robot based on a ring-wing design; take a look at their videos and watch this device in action.

The other, Tidal Generation, also a local start-up company, is a bunch of folk who worked for one of the established tidal energy companies. Despite their commitment to the technology and its potential contribution to helping reduce climate change, they left the business in near despair. Their problem was that conventional device designs required specialist vessels to position the tidal generators. There aren’t many such ships and, as a result, you have to book them years in advance, creating a major bottle-neck in deploying this much-needed technology.

Faced with this problem, they took a radically different approach and designed a device that could be deployed by a  simpler vessel at the rate of one a day (in the right weather conditions, of course). They also overcame the problem of maintaining generators running at 40m depth in tidal races of 4m/second by simply recognising that if they were made to float, they could be easily brought to the surface and then towed inshore for any necessary work. This is in contrast, once again, to the need for a specialist vessel with heavy lifting equipment.

Two great examples of using science and engineering principles to solve real, multi-disciplinary problems through teamwork and good project management.