First it was solving a complex protein puzzle related to the HIV virus, and this time it is the 40,000 registered users of the game Planet Hunters who have identified 69 potential new planets and two very strong candidate planets outside the Earth’s solar system. We think we see a new trend in the making.

This latest breakthrough involved taking data retrieved from NASA’s Kepler space telescope that has been recording images at the mind-boggling pace of one image every 30 seconds since 2009. The goal? To find potential habitable planets outside our solar system. Trained on the Cygnus constellation — located on the northern plane of the Milky Way — the telescope recorded over 200,000 stars. That’s a lot of space people.

The good scientists over at NASA know a problem when they see one. That amount of data is simply too much for a small group to handle, so like others before them they cried, “Houston, we have a…” wait! Let’s change that to “Gentlemen, to the gamers!”

Planet Hunters challenges players to analyze data by viewing the actions of stars over time.

via Gamers are at it again, this time discovering new worlds | DVICE.

We always knew gamers had serious smarts, but now the rest of the world knows it, too. Gamers have been listed alongside scientists as responsible for cracking the code of how an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus is put together.

The accomplishment, chronicled in a recent issue of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, is a puzzle that has stumped science for well over 10 years. The enzyme M-PMV, in the protease family, is key in the molecular structure of retroviruses that causes AIDS in simians and includes HIV. Understanding how a virus is put together is a major leap towards understanding how to construct drugs to combat disease.

via Scientists unravel AIDS virus mystery with unlikely ally: gamers | DVICE.