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First Pulsar Discovery By an @Home Project

pq writes "In a paper published today (abstract) in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany." The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing is hard to swallow; there are quite a few distributed projects out there, several of which have reported positive results, such as the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne number.

5 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Oh wait, I'm blind by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh wait, it was claimed in something that wasn't the Title, which I guess makes me as stupid as the submitter.

    que sera sera.

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are
  2. Re:Space by Midnight's+Shadow · · Score: 4, Funny

    I disagree. SETI@home has discovered that they can get many people to use their personal computational power and electricity to process random signals in a vague hope of discovering intelligent life.

    --
    "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
  3. Re:Folding@Home by interkin3tic · · Score: 2, Funny

    No idea how you combine those two into "The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing".

    Distributed summary writing, mostly.

  4. Re:Folding@Home by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Funny

    refuse pump

    Tell me, do you feel somehow obliged to read stories from a "refuse pump"?

    It's like the fat woman who complains how horrible the fried chicken tastes as she digs into the third bucket.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  5. Almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins by noidentity · · Score: 2, Funny
    From the article:

    The program, which has been downloaded to 500,000 computers around the world over the past five years, almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins at home.

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.