Die Gute Fabrik. Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle. Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.
Photo by AFP The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where -- exceptionally in scientific publishing -- both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors. Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV. Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.
Wannabe SEALs Help U.S. Navy Hunt Pirates In Massively Multiplayer Game. All those years playing World of Warcraft may not have been for naught: The United States Navy has begun crowdsourcing ideas for fighting Somali pirates ... through a new video game project.
The game platform, called MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet--not a reference to Jungle Book), is the product of years of research, will include more than 1,000 military and civilian players, and is planned for launch on May 16. It marks the first major effort by the American military to integrate both crowdsourcing and gamification into traditional military wargames. MMOWGLI was developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in order to test the feasibility of using massively multiplayer online games along the lines of Warcraft and Guild Wars to help solve difficult strategic problems.