So here (I think nature has no paywall): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02175-6

Authors report on how they made vast progress using a minigame within a popular video game to get high numbers of data oints by game-playing people.
This is citizen science at its best, when people help science without even knowing and no expertise required.

@Ponderable
What are they trying to show?

@sonhouse
BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies.

@Ponderable
Wouldn't that mean to get correlation data they would have to have DNA samples from the players as well as the game data?

@sonhouse said
@Ponderable
Wouldn't that mean to get correlation data they would have to have DNA samples from the players as well as the game data?

@Ponderable
Snippets of RNA from a million people? How do they do that? Snippets from other folks not in the study?
Oh, I get it now, it helps to actually read the article🙂 So the game is to put the snippets together by the game, now it makes sense. Kind of like having supercomputers on the cheap, eh.

@sonhouse

No millions of people get tasks for reconstruction snippets of a single sample.