ARE VIDEO GAMES THE KEY TO MODERN SCIENCE?

Video gamers spend tons of time -- for many it's 10,000 hours by age 21 -- battling mythic monsters, shooting aliens and rescuing princesses from digital castles. Adrien Treuille wants to put those efforts to better use.

The Carnegie Mellon computer scientist is the creator of two online games -- Foldit and EteRNA -- that put video gamers to work solving epic scientific puzzles.

His aim is to make super-boring-sounding scientific mysteries like "protein folding" and "RNA synthesis" fun and challenging for gamers.

The results have been staggering, as Foldit and EteRNA players -- there are about 430,000 of them between those two games, most of them playing Foldit -- continue to make discoveries that had eluded scientists and their supercomputers.

Earlier this month, for example, Foldit players helped solve a puzzle about proteins that could further research into HIV/AIDS. Their work was co-published in the journal Nature.

Players know they're working on science puzzles, but the games are meant to be fun.

"One of our goals when we made Foldit is to make proteins toy-like, which is actually a technical term from game design," Treuille said in a recent interview at the PopTech conference. "It should be something you want to play with, like a Lego or a Tinkertoy.

"Proteins are these esoteric things that most people don't know very much about, but through computer graphics and interaction we were able to make them something you can play with and wiggle and pull -- and make them physically real for people. And I think that realness -- that toy-like aspect of proteins -- is what made it ultimately comprehensible to our players, and allowed them to solve problems that elude computer programs."

To get why this is significant you have to understand a little bit about proteins, which Treuille describes as building blocks for life. If scientists can better understand the shapes of proteins, they can do more to build them themselves, which could lead to new methods of disease prevention and treatment.

But they need help figuring out how to use these tools.

"We're building with, like, completely new materials," he said, "so we know how to build with hammers but we don't know how to build with As Gs Cs and Us yet." That's where the games come in.

Gamers essentially are teaching scientists and computers how to build with genetic code, by toying with the shapes of RNA and proteins to see what works best. In Foldit, they're awarded points for making proteins that use the least amount of energy. In EteRNA, which launched earlier this year, a Stanford lab actually will create a picture of the sequences made in the game.

"When you create a molecule in the game we actually synthesize it -- we make it for real and we send you back pictures of what you've made," he said. Here's more on how that game works:

"What we actually do is give the players very simple tasks like build a circle, build a star," he said. "These are tasks that are beyond the limits of science today, but through trial and error and being able to play with real molecules through this computer game, people have been able to figure out how to solve these tasks, which is sort of extraordinary."

Treuille has high hopes for gaming's potential to unlock good in humanity -- and impact the real world. "People can solve much more complex problems online at the edge of human knowledge," he said in a PopTech speech, "and I think we've just scratched the surface."

WITH A BANG - LITTLE ICE AGE BEGAN

The Little Ice Age, a centuries-long spell of cold summers in Europe and elsewhere, began suddenly late in the 13th century, a new study finds. A string of volcanic explosions may have set off this change in climate by belching particles that reflected sunlight and allowed Arctic sea ice to reach epic proportions, researchers report online January 31 in Geophysical Research Letters.

“We’ve been able to identify the beginning of the Little Ice Age, something that’s been very difficult to do in the past,” says Gifford Miller, a paleoclimatologist and geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This cooling wasn’t gradual; it was an abrupt shift.”

It’s long been known that much of the globe became chillier during the Renaissance. By the 17th century, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by half a degree Celsius compared with medieval times. Ice skating on London’s frozen River Thames became popular.

To pin down when this climate change began, Miller’s team traveled to Baffin Island on the northern fringes of Canada. Small glaciers in this region tend to respond quickly to temperature changes. Carbon dating of moss entombed in Baffin’s ice revealed two sudden advances of the snow line that killed off the vegetation: a sudden cold spell between 1275 to 1300, followed by intensifying cold between 1430 and 1455.

Testing whether this chill extended beyond Canada took the researchers to the Langjökull glacier, the second largest ice cap in Iceland. Layered sediments from a nearby lake appeared progressively thicker in the 14th century — exactly what would be expected if the glacier expanded and ground away the landscape.

These chillier conditions began during an especially active time for volcanoes. “The second half of the 13th century had the most volcanism of any period of the past 1,500 years,” says Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Volcanoes have been blamed for the Little Ice Age before. But the cooling produced by an eruption tends to be short-lived. The atmosphere recovers from the junk spewed into the sky within a few years. The challenge is to explain how the Little Ice Age persisted for many centuries.

“It’s been hard to understand how volcanism could lead to such long-lasting cooling,” says Stephen Vavrus, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sea ice may have been the secret to keeping Earth frosty. In simulations of global climate run by Miller’s team, volcanic eruptions stimulated the growth of Arctic ice. Normally, this ice would melt back during summer months. But a series of four explosions, each within a decade of the last, could have expanded the ice enough to make it stable, says Miller.

Polar ice samples have revealed just such a series of eruptions, says Robock: an especially big explosion somewhere in the world in 1258, and three smaller ones in 1268, 1275 and 1284.

Whether these events could have kicked off the Little Ice Age still isn’t certain. Two occurred in the Southern Hemisphere, which may have muted their impact. And some of the simulations run by Miller’s team didn’t lead to supersized sea ice cover, even with four eruptions.

Still, the new study offers a plausible chain of events, says Robock, ready to be put to the test by other climate simulations.

COMPUTERS NOW REALLY GET UNDER YOUR SKIN

A small electronic device slapped onto the skin like a temporary tattoo could bring us closer to a future that melds body and machine, a cyborg world where people have cell phones embedded in their throats and Internet browsers literally at their fingertips.

Described in the Aug. 12 Science, the gizmos were developed by researchers looking to create less obtrusive medical monitors for premature babies and other special-needs patients. But the technology’s potential for integrating computers into the human body could be vast.

“This is a huge breakthrough,” says nanoengineer Michael McAlpine of Princeton University. “This goes beyond Dick Tracy calling someone with a cell phone on the wrist. It’s having the wrist itself house the device so it’s always with you.”

Though traditional electronic devices are becoming smaller and more powerful, they are still clunky external objects that must be held in the hand or touched. The new stretchy, wireless electronics promise to seamlessly integrate the body with the surrounding electronic world.

The challenge, says study coauthor John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was matching typically rigid electrical components to the soft, stretchy and flexible skin. Rogers and his colleagues achieved this by converting brittle silicon to a more forgiving state by making it very thin.

The electronic components — which can include light-emitting diodes, solar cells, transistors and antennae, among other things — were all constructed in a malleable net of wavy S-shapes similar to old-fashioned coiled telephone cords, which allows the circuits to work when stretched in any direction.

The researchers sandwiched these components between two protective layers of polyimide, a type of polymer. These layers sit on top of a rubbery silicone film that adheres to skin with weak chemical bonds. The device can also be applied in a temporary tattoo, which both disguises the grid and makes it stick longer.

Rogers is focused on medical applications for the electronic skin. But the basic building blocks of the system can be configured in many ways for widely different uses, he says.

“I think creative folks out there will think of things we haven’t even contemplated,” Rogers says.

For example, the technology has drawn the interest of security-minded people who might be interested in using the electronics to develop a covert communication system. “CIA and others have been interested,” Rogers says. A tiny hidden patch of electronics on the throat, for instance, could allow two agents to covertly communicate with one another. The electronics could detect and transmit muscle activity that represents words, all without the person making a sound.

The superthin electronic skin wrinkles, puckers and stretches just like the body’s skin, making it less intrusive than the bulky wires and cumbersome electrodes typically used to monitor vital signs.

“You can put these on someone’s skin and they can wrinkle their forehead. They could frown,” says neurologist and bioengineer Brian Litt of the University of Pennsylvania. “The materials science is just wonderful.”

The adhesive electronics pick up signals from people’s heartbeats when stuck on the chest, skeletal muscle activity when stuck on the leg, and brain waves when stuck on the forehead, the researchers report. In the study, signals from the body traveled from the device along a thin wire to a computer.

The patches collected data accurately for up to six hours, and showed no signs of degradation or irritation to the arm, neck, forehead, cheek or chin after 24 hours. The researchers think this life span could be extended, particularly if a strong adhesive is used. But Rogers points out that long-term use of the device is limited because skin cells periodically slough off.

Such devices could serve as conduits between the body and other electronics. In their tests the researchers used electronic skin to control a video game. When stuck on the throat, the device read the electrical activity of muscles as a person spoke the words “up,” “down,” “left,” and “right” to control a computer cursor as it navigated through a maze.

The researchers plan to improve the technology by enabling wireless communication and adding ways to store power. The device already has the capability to get power from wireless coils and solar cells. And in the future, such electronics could be designed to power themselves with stray electromagnetic signals or even energy from body heat.

Stretchable, nonintrusive monitors could be particularly helpful for premature babies, Rogers says. The electrodes and monitors now used to track neonatal babies’ vital signs are large and may irritate fragile newborn skin. Such nonintrusive monitors might also help people undergoing sleep studies. The bulky electrodes that measure brain waves often interfere with the sleep the doctors are trying to measure.

And the potential medical applications of the flexible electronics aren’t limited to monitoring. The electronics could offer better control of prosthetic limbs, ways for people with larynx disease to communicate and new treatments for muscle injuries. Rogers and his collaborators are currently testing whether electrical signals produced by electronic skin can improve muscle function in rats after an injury.