[NetBehaviour] Tired of justifying your gaming addiction?

[marc garrett]

Tired of justifying your gaming addiction?

Now you can really help accomplish something while you play... thanks to 
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher David Baker at the University 
of Washington." In collaboration with others, Baker has designed a game, 
called "Foldit," with a practical outcome: players manipulate on-screen 
images of protein chains and attempt to predict their folding patterns. 
 From the article: "'Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do 
it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was,' 
says [co-creator Zoran] Popovic. At the moment, the game only uses 
proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by 
researchers. But, says Popovic, 'soon we'll be introducing puzzles for
which we don't know the solution.

more...
http://www.hhmi.org/news/foldit20080508.html