Video gamers are lending their hands, in particular their thumbs, to battlefield medics.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is known for bizarre crowd sourcing techniques and odd approaches to technology development, and recently they challenged gamers to come up with a solution for 'sepsis,' a bacterial infection in the blood.
The infection is more common on the battlefield, where keeping a wound, particularly deep tissue wounds, hygienic is not always possible.
Defensetech reports that DARPA is using a website called FoldIt, it's own crowd sourcing site, to challenge gamers to come up with the best way to fold proteins in order to develop new ways to attack other proteins that cause sepsis.
From the FoldIt site:
Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
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