Review: Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe

Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe by Louisa Preston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"It was ok" is maybe the most positive I feel towards this book. I'm not exactly sure what audience Dr. Preston is aiming for, but I definitely felt like the prose was intended for a teenager or younger. Science communication often tackles with how to inform your audience without necessarily being condescending; Goldilocks and the Water Bears introduces lots of concepts and helpfully italicizes them when first mentioned, giving off the feel of a textbook. Some of these chapters, like the one describing what defines life and conditions life might need, definitely felt textbook-ish, especially with several italicized vocabulary words per paragraph.

One of my earlier criticisms as I was reading was that I'm finding pop culture references walk a fine line between potentially dated and cool enough to draw the reader in. The first chapter of this book discusses science fiction and how our space fantasies may inspire us to develop similar technologies or look for life in various ways. While not the focus of the book, the short explanations for some pieces of media (like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) were very general- I initially dismissed this as "Well, it is a tangent so best not to linger on it..."

I read a library copy, and an earlier reader had penciled in corrections in a few places (slashing through a comma at one point, correcting numbers elsewhere, and in a later chapter, crossing out "carnivorous" and writing in "allotrophic" in the margins).

I also take issue with the use roughly once a chapter of "Fun fact: [fact here]." If it's a fun fact, shouldn't the fact speak for itself?

Perhaps her TED talk is more engaging, but the prose is very eh. I'd maybe recommend this to a middle or high school reader.

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Level Up: Gamers Advance Scientific Knowledge

This article was originally written for Biol 494: Popular Science Journalism during the Fall 2011 semester. It was published in both The Tiger on Dec. 8th, 2011 and in the Fall 2011 edition of Tigra Scientifica, which is available here.

Most of us have a favorite mindless video game  -- some farm digital crops on facebook; others shoot mad birds with a slingshot. What if we could turn those hours and hours of screen time into something of good use? Within a two-week span during September 2011, gamers have solved problems in the biological and astronomical fields. Players of a protein-folding game called Foldit developed by the University of Washington generated a number of possible molecular models for an enzyme that retroviruses like HIV use to replicate themselves. Players of a game called Planet Hunters, developed by Yale and collaborators, also discovered two new planet candidates outside our solar system.  Both of these games used crowd-sourcing: a large group of people performs tasks and solves problems traditionally done by a specific person.

A large part of scientific research is trying to piece together how things work, whether in terms of mechanisms of action or three-dimensional structures. Foldit allows players to manipulate the 3D structure of a protein for ‘points’ when they get an ideal structure. The program constantly updates with new puzzles based on protein structures, and players can work alone or share ideas in groups.

As described in the September Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Foldit players discovered molecular models for a retroviral protease (what viruses like HIV use for replication), whose structure had eluded scientists for years. Researchers at the University of Washington asked a group of Foldit players to submit models to the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction, an experiment that takes place every two years where the amino acid sequence of a protein is posted, and teams must find the closest match to a protein’s native structure -- its natural working state.  The Foldit team Void Crushers correctly found a near-native model of the protease but also improved it with some structural modifications. The models discovered allowed researchers to determine the crystal structure of the protein. Now that science know the structure, the new model makes finding potential cures to retroviral diseases like AIDS a possibility.

The Planet Hunters game is a collaboration between Yale and Zooniverse, a developer of amateur-based science projects. Plant Hunters allows players to sift through data collected by the Kepler space telescope, monitoring shifts in brightness of stars.  When dips in light occur, a planet is passing between the star and our field of vision. 

Planet Hunters involved 40,000 players poring over data from the Kepler space telescope.  Users viewed light curves, indicated whether it was “variable” or “quiet”, and marked interesting features. Planet Hunters also allowed users to discuss the data with other citizen scientists in a forum, where similar curves were grouped in discussion threads. After 4 million games, 69 planet candidates were identified. Two of the planet candidates were described in a paper in the September Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Planet Hunters involved in their discovery were identified as coauthors of the paper.

Despite the computational power available today, both papers used crowd sourcing as a tool, citing the ability of humans to detect patterns more intuitively than a computer program. In the future, games like this could make research more accessible to people who may not have a background in a particular topic. If you want to do science from your laptop, you can download the Foldit at fold.it/portal/ or play Planet Hunters at www.planethunters.org. So keep in mind – you don’t have to be a Ph.D to advance scientific knowledge, you may just have to play some video games.

Fischer, et al. “Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data”, RAS, MNAS. September 26^th, 2011

Khatib, et al. “Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players”, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. September 19^th, 2011