Games of Science - online computational People Powered Science...	............
Scientist are now tapping a vast source of public knowledge via a small suite of video and computer games that enlist the collective intelligence of many non-scientist game players to solve fiendishly complex scientific problems. These games aim to take academic advantage of the countless hours gamers spend playing each day.
SETI@HOME...  is a special purpose super computer application that analyzes radio signals captured by radio telescopes from the galaxies looking for non-random intelligence radio signals. The supercomputer is large numbers of internet connected desktop computers each with a downloaded screen saver that analyzes by Fourier Transform  samples of radio signals & returns them to U.C. Berkeley. SETI@home project borrows your computer when you aren't using it to analyze small segments of telemetry that can be worked on separately.                                           http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php
Rosetta@home    a computer project (created by David Baker at U. of Washington that farmed out computationally intensive protein folding simulations to home computers using a screen saver interface, similar to what Seti@home does.      http://boinc.bakerlab.org/	▼
EteRNA - 1st internet-scale citizen science game to better understand RNA folding    an online video game (2011) where gamers with no scientific background arrange colored discs into 2-D chain-link shapes. The discs represent nucleotides and the patterns they form are blueprints for RNA molecules. By switching each disc in the chain into one of four color-coded nucleotides, EteRNA players design RNA molecules, the best of which are synthesized in the lab...  http://eterna.cmu.edu/web/     A community of 37,000 non-experts provided continuous remote laboratory feedback to establish new design rules that substantially improve the experimental accuracy of RNA structure designs. These rules resulted in a new automated algorithm EteRNABot. These results [PNAS paper]  show that an online community can carry out large-scale experiments, hypothesis generation, and algorithm design to create practical advances in empirical science.
Foldit... was created by structural biologists at U. of Washington. Foldit challenges players to work out the best 3-D structure of proteins by folding chains of virtual amino acids into optimal configurations in a competitive online game. Players are presented with a mix of zigzags, squiggles, and loops representing the amino acids of a protein. Moving the cursor allows users to grab, bend, wiggle, and shake various parts of the molecule, with the aim of folding the messy structure into its optimal shape - the form that has the lowest energy, just as molecules tend to do in real life. The more stable the structure, the higher the score.    In Sep 2011, Foldit players made a breakthrough: they solved the structure of a retroviral protease of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, which causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys, a problem that had stumped scientists for a decade. The study was published in Nature  Structural and Molecular Biology (18:1175-77, 2011), and listed the “Foldit Contenders Group” and the “Foldit Void Crushers Group” among the papers authors.     In Jan 2012 Foldit players redesigned an enzyme in a way that sped up a reaction crucial to the production of a variety of drugs by almost 2,000 percent... foldit animation  (Nature Biotechnology, 30:190-92, 2012).       http://fold.it/portal/	▼
Cell Slider... an online database of microscope slides of cells from cancer drug trials in which volunteers identify cancerous cells by looking at slides from drug trials. The program director has indicated that what volunteers identified in 3 months would have taken 18 months by her researchers alone.	▼
FrackFinder... non-Scientist volunteers pored over 9,000 online aerial images to identify and classify well locations used for fracking in Pennsylvania. In just 29 days, they made 90,000 classifications - each categorized by 10 different volunteers to reduce errors — and identified 1,420 well locations. The project’s next phase will be to track visible surface impacts of fracking.
Eye Wire...  is an online citizen science human-based computation game about tracing neurons in the retina and is designed to help map the brain. The goals of EyeWire are to identify specific cell types within the known broad classes of retinal cells, and to map the connections between neurons in the retina, which will help to determine how vision works.
the Cure...  a game developed at the Scripps Research Institute to help find better predictive biomarkers for breast cancer prognosis. Launched last September, The Cure works like a card game in which players assemble a “hand” of five genes from a board of 25 genes pre-selected for their relevance to the disease. The gene set that wins is the one that produces the best predictive model of breast cancer prognosis, as determined by a cross-validation statistical analysis.
The Zooniverse... enables anyone to take part in cutting edge scientific research in fields as diverse as the sciences and humanities [Zooniverse* - see Microscopy Masters].                                                        (site found by Avery Elizabeth DeVault, Bil 255-Fall 2016).
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