Boffins need your help to identify galaxies

SCIENTISTS AT Oxford University want you to help them analyse terabytes of galactic data and sort them into elliptical or spiral sorts.

The images come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico but although this robotic instrument has grabbed loads of images, computers are absolutely crap at identifying whether a galaxy is spiral or looks like a doughnut.

The telescope has a 142 megapixel digital camera and is snapping away a map of our universe like there's no tomorrow. Chief boffin Kevin Schawinski said your human brain is better at pattern recognition than a PC. The boffs want people to have a crack at recognising which type of galaxy is which - and you can sign on and learn more by boldly clicking here.

As it's now impossible for quite a few of us to access data on our 5.25-inch collection of floppies and soon 3.5-inch floppies, it makes us wonder whether all this digitised stuff will still be available to humanoids 1,000 years down the line.

We were talking to another type of boffin about this the other day, who is involved in digitising ancient Sanskrit text and he said that quite a few specially treated 1,000-year old texts on palm leaves and specially treated paper and birch bark are still in fine fettle even now.

As books we bought in the 1970s are already crumbling because the publishers used crap paper, it makes you wonder how long the Empire of Microsoft will continue to support data formats of the early 21st century. µ