PULLMAN, Wash. — Mothers be careful when you tell your kids that playing on-line games isn’t the same as curing cancer. Actually, playing on-line games is about the same as curing AIDS. Yahoo News reported that on-line gamers did something in three weeks that scientists haven’t been able to do in a decade of work to fight AIDS. The journal “Structural & Molecular Biology” says that the Washington State University gamers – prompted by medical researchers — used a scientifically-based game called Foldit to come up with the structure of an enzyme in an AIDS-like virus. In Foldit, teams of gamers compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins One of the researchers in the article said with the results of the game, they’ll be able to design a drug specifically to fight the virus. One of the game’s creators, Seth Cooper, said that people have good spatial reasoning skills, — something that doesn’t compute for a machine so far.
Monday, Sept. 26, 9 a.m.
