Foldit

For using crowdsourced gaming to decipher–in three weeks–a structural enigma of the AIDS virus that stumped doctors for a decade. In Foldit, a multiplayer computer game developed by researchers at the University of Washington, players compete to find the best way to fold a protein or design new proteins, and it turns out they’re better than the experts. “We’re seeing the players starting to actually direct the protein experiments going out to the labs,” says Seth Cooper, Foldit’s lead designer.