Steemit Writers, Science Needs Your Help! Get the word out on how any computer or Android can boost research on cancer, astrophysics, clean energy & more!
Writers of Steemit (greetings new writers!), your friend #Science could use some help. With recent budget cuts, rising willful ignorance among the powerful and the masses, and the most anti-science federal government (and media) the United States has had in ages (maybe ever), science is having a rough time these days.
Science wants to help us better understand our universe and find cures to cancer, AIDS, and Zika; and this is the thanks it gets?!
The good news is, you (yes you!) can do something (well a couple somethings) easy right now to help out our old pal Science:
1. Install BOINC
2. Write about BOINC and nag your family and friends about it until they think you are crazy or until they install it.
What is BOINC you ask?
BOINC is the fun-sounding name of open-source software for volunteer computing that enables most computers or Android devices to do research on any of dozens of projects.
If you started installation now, your laptop or phone could be doing cancer research in five minutes! Time it and let me know if I was wrong.
Once you've installed it, you can pick from numerous projects that study topics including clean energy, galaxy evolution, asteroids, pulsars, Zika, childhood cancer, protein folding, prime numbers, neural networks, & much more!
After installing BOINC and feeling quite good about yourself for taking simple steps to help the world, the next step is to let other people know about it. I've written multiple articles here and elsewhere about the need for greater publicity for volunteer computing and how those in the media are falling down on the job. When BOINC gets press, it sees a spike in volunteers. The bad news is, it is getting less and less press and fewer people are becoming aware of it.
The graphs below (from BOINCstats.com) show what happens when individual projects get covered in the press. You can help recruit new volunteers simply by writing about it and telling your friends and family about it.
Rosetta@home after it got positive press coverage:
What's in it for me, you ask?
If helping research more efficient solar panel materials and cures for childhood cancer isn't enough to make you want to join, perhaps the knowledge that being a boss on BOINC can earn you some fancy cryptocurrency will help convince you. #Gridcoin (as well as Curecoin and others) use computations done for volunteer computing projects to mine new coins (rather than wasting an amount of energy equal to that used by whole cities *cough* Bitcoin *cough*). Gridcoin happens to be worth 15x what it was just in March and they have a great community on here that would love to help you get started!
For more information, check out #boinc or my posts below:
Let Your Computer Dream About Science While You Sleep (& Earn Cryptocurrency For Doing So!
BOINC - Impressive Accomplishments and Incredible Potential
https://www.inverse.com/article/6592-supercomputer-boinc-update
https://medium.com/adventures-in-volunteer-computing
Great write-up. I had no idea that press coverage of individual projects had such a big impact. It would be good to see BOINC as a whole getting that kind of media attention.
Exactly! I've tried to pitch the BOINC as a whole concept to lots of places and they just don't seem interested. They think readers will only be interested in specific projects like the Zika one when Zika was hot news. I'd love to see Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson just tweet about it once.
100% upvote & re-steem, top marks for trying!