Game Night, Now With Fever

A couple of news items to fit in the games category.

Foldit, the folding game that has helped improve understanding of protein folding, is looking to strike out in a slightly new direction.  Per Nature Medicine, the game team behind Foldit has started work on the development of new enzymes.  In other words, now that there’s been some success with determining existing structures, Foldit has started to work on new structures.  There was an effort to build an enzyme in early January, and Foldit players can expect to work on other small molecules later this year.

Two biologists and their colleagues have added to the science-themed shelf at your game store.  Called Mulzenberg Mathematical Fever, this ‘pedagogical tool‘ is a variant on an older kind of childhood game.  In this case, participants are infected by slips of paper handed to them, with instructions for propagating the disease.  The benefits for the participants come from the data sets generated via the game.  This provides more tangible sets of data for them to work with the mathematics of outbreaks and epidemiology.  As far as I can tell from the coverage of the game, while the researchers intend to develop variants of the game for other aspects of epidemiology, there are no plans to prepare it for home use.  But you could do it yourself for just pennies.