A very cool new crowd-sourcing game has just launched from Andrew Su, Ben Good et al. It's fun and brain-challenging and immediately addictive.
To start playing, check out the Mark2Cure beta release.
Mark2Cure allows anyone that can read English, regardless of background, to help in the process of biomedical discovery. Scientific literature is growing at a rate of more than 2 new articles every single minute. It is hard for scientists to know what to read and to read everything that is relevant.
Mark2Cure works by teaching citizen scientists to precisely identify concepts and concept relationships in biomedical text. This is a task that anyone can learn to do and can perform better than any known computer program. Once these tasks are completed, advanced statistical algorithms take the data provided by the volunteers and use it to provide scientists with new tools for finding the information that they require within the sea of biomedical knowledge.
The initial goal is to highlight concepts in rare genetic disease research literature. Historically, rare genetic disease researchers have relied heavily on patient communities and foundations to fund their work. Many of the discoveries on rare genetic diseases would not be possible without the highly active and extremely dedicated community of patients/parents of patients. Mark2Cure invites everyone, especially members of these communities, to help researchers spend less time studying research literature, and more time finding a cure.
