Pupa U.P.A. Gilbert / Christopher E. Killian / UW-Madison

"Biomineral Single Crystals" is the first-place winner as well as the People's Choice in the photography category of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. These biomineral crystals are found in a sea urchin's tooth, and captured here using environmental scanning electron microscopy. Each color highlights a single crystal of calcite, making the tooth tough enough to grind rock.

The minerals of a sea urchin's tooth, a heart that beats in virtual reality and a wiring diagram based on a macaque monkey's brain are among the top honorees in the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation.

The annual contest, now in its 10th year, highlights works in visual media that promote understanding of scientific research. This year, 215 entries were received from 18 countries. The winners were selected by a panel of judges, and in addition, People's Choice awards were given out based on 3,155 public votes recorded via the Internet.

"These winners continue to amaze me every year with their remarkable talent and drive to engage the public," Monica Bradford, Science's executive editor, said Thursday in a news release announcing the top picks. "The visuals are not only novel and captivating, but they also draw you into the complex field of science in a simple and understandable way."

For example, take a look at "Alya Red: A Computational Heart," which won top honors in the video category as well as a People's Choice award. The film combines illustration, three-dimensional renderings and live-action video to describe the basic science of the heart in easy-to-understand language. "Understanding our organs — and the heart in particular — in deep detail is one of the challenges of modern medicine," Fernando Cucchietti of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center said in the news release. "The video presents the approach of our particular project ... which aims at developing large-scale numerical simulators of the heart."

The first-place illustration is "Connectivity of a Cognitive Computer Based on the Macaque Brain," which diagrams the connections between the major regions of a macaque monkey's brain. Such diagrams are helping researchers at IBM develop a new generation of "neuro-synaptic" computer chips that can be connected to form a brainlike network.

"Biomineral Single Crystals" looks like an abstract painting, but it's actually a photograph showing the structure of a sea urchin's tooth. The picture won first place in the photo category as well as a People's Choice award. "The shapes in this image are naturally formed in the sea urchin tooth," explained Pupa Gilbert of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Color is added in Photoshop to heighten the visual impact of the structure, and to emphasize how interconnected and intertwined the crystal forms are."

In all, the judges highlighted 15 top entries among photos, videos and illustrations, as well as posters and graphics, plus games and apps. Here's the full rundown:

OTHER TOP PHOTOS

Kai-Hung Fung

"Self Defense" won honorable mention in the photography category. The image is a 3-D CT scan of a clam and a whelk, both alive. The clam, at left, is nestled comfortably in the bottom half of its shell. The whelk, meanwhile, is protected by a shell with a sophisticated spiral construction. Both creatures solve the vital problem of self-defense, in different ways. But the whelk has the upper hand: It can drill a hole directly through the clam's shell by softening it with secretions, and then make a meal of the clam. The photography is by Kai-hung Fung of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong.

Charles U. / CTU

"X-Ray Micro-Radiography and Microscopy of Seeds" won honorable mention in the photography category. The array of pictures shows high-resolution, high-contrast X-ray radiography of plant seeds alongside images captured through microscopy. The technique can be used as a powerful tool allowing non-destructive investigation of millimeter-sized objects of any kind. The seeds shown here are roughly 3 millimeters in width, or a little more than a tenth of an inch. The photographic team from Charles University and Czech Technical University includes Viktor Sykora, Jan Zemlicka, Frantisek Krejci and Jan Jakubek.

ILLUSTRATIONS

IBM Research - Almaden

"Connectivity of a Cognitive Computer Based on the Macaque Brain" is the first-place winner in the illustration category of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Challenge. This visualization shows more than 320,000 connections between 4,173 neuro-synaptic "cores" representing the 77 largest regions in the macaque brain. This sort of "wiring diagram" serves as a guide for the design of neuro-synaptic computer chips being developed by Cognitive Computing researchers at IBM. The illustration is by Emmett McQuinn, Theodore M. Wong, Pallab Datta, Myron D. Flickner, Raghavendra Singh, Steven K. Esser, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, William P. Risk and Dharmendra S. Modha.

Sherbrook Connectivity Imaging Lab

"Cerebral Infiltration" won honorable mention and People's Choice in the illustration category. The image is the result of fiber tractography from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. It illustrates the structural connections contained in the white matter of the brain. The red, smooth surface represents a glioblastoma tumor. Blue fibers indicate that the fibers are located a safe distance away from the tumor, while the red fibers are in a close perimeter to the tumor and can cause severe post-operation deficits if they are cut. The illustration is by Maxime Chamberland, David Fortin and Maxime Descoteaux.

VIDEOS

POSTERS AND GRAPHICS

• First place: "Adaptations of the Owl's Cervical and Cephalic Arteries in Relation to Extreme Neck Rotation" is a large-format poster that was created as part of a master's thesis study on the ability of owls to rotate their necks around 270 degrees. The arterial structure of 12 deceased owl specimens were examined through dissection as well as digital subtraction angiography. The full study team included Fabian de Kok-Mercado, Michael Habib, Tim Phelps, Lydia Gregg and Phillippe Gailloud of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The research resulted in a paper that was published in this week's issue of Science.
• Honorable mention: "Earth Evolution: The Intersection of Geology and Biology" is an educational poster showing how geological and biological processes have shaped Earth's environment during its 4.6 billion-year history. The poster was created by Eriko Clements, Mark Nielsen, Satoshi Amagai, Bill Pietsch, Davey Thomas and Andy Knoll, from The Educational Resources Group, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Astronaut 3 Media Group.
• People's Choice: "The Pharma Transport Town: Understanding the Routes to Sustainable Pharmaceutical Use" is an informational graphic that shows the complex transport routes of pharmaceuticals in the environment, and considers psychological influences upon drug use and disposal. It was created by Will Stahl-Timmins, Clare Redshaw and Matthew White of the European Center for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter Medical School.

GAMES AND APPS

• Honorable mention: "Velocity Raptor," created by Andy Hall of TestTubeGames, is a Flash game about special relativity. Set in a world where you move at nearly the speed of light, the game starts off easy, and slowly adds in relativistic effects.
• Honorable mention: "CyGaMEs Selene II: A Lunar Construction GaME" lets players construct Earth's moon to discover and apply concepts in Earth and space science. The game's creators include Debbie Denise Reese, Robert E. Kosko, Charles A. Wood and Cassie Lightfritz of the CyGaMEs Project, Center for Educational Technologies, Wheeling Jesuit University; and Barbara G. Tabachnick of the University of California at Northridge.
• People's Choice: "Untangled," created by Gayatri Mehta of the University of North Texas, has users compete to create the most compact layouts of circuit elements on a grid. The game uses realistic algorithms that players are mapping onto different chip architectures that could be manufactured in silicon. 

More adventures in visualization:

• Visualizing science in 2012
• Visualizing science in 2011
• Visualizing science in 2010
• Visualizing science in 2009
• Nikon 2012 Small World in Motion
• Nikon 2011 Small World in Motion
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2012
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2011
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2010
• The world within a drop of water
• Greatest hits from Nikon Small World
• Olympus Bioscapes' top 10 for 2012
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2011
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2010
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2009

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

UW Center for Game Science / Baker Lab

Foldit players learn to resolve structural conflicts in a protein molecule due to amino acid size (indicated by spiky red balls in this game visualization).

Researchers say that players of a protein-folding game called Foldit are coming up with molecular "recipes" that rival their own complex algorithms.

One of the recipes — a computerized tool called "Blue Fuse," which checks whether a protein molecule is in its highest-scoring configuration — knocked Foldit's creators for a loop. "When I saw the Blue Fuse algorithm, I recognized immediately that it was almost identical in concept to the best algorithm that we developed in my research group over a period of years," David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me today.

It took the players of the Foldit game only about seven months to come up with their version, and they're continuing to improve the recipe.

"We were shocked to find state-of the art algorithms," Zoran Popovic, director of UW's Center for Game Science and the game's co-creator, said in a university news release.

UW computer scientist Seth Cooper, Foldit's other co-creator as well as lead designer/developer, said the findings demonstrate the power of collaborative game play for solving scientific problems. "It's a great thing to show what kinds of things video games and gamers can accomplish," he told me.

The science behind the recipe-writing process is detailed in a research paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More than a game
Protein-folding isn't just a game: The structures of protein molecules are the keys to a wide range of biological processes. In a sense, proteins literally serve as "keys" and "locks" to open up cellular pathways, to admit or block viruses, to start or stop the machinery of life. If scientists can gain a better understanding of how those keys and locks work, they could actually design their own molecules for future medications and nanomachines.

That's where Foldit and other protein-folding software tools can play a huge role. Foldit is a social game based on a computerized molecule-manipulation program called Rosetta, which was developed a decade ago by Baker and his colleagues at UW. The Foldit game has enlisted hundreds of thousands of players who can work together (or compete against each other) to twist and turn virtual molecules and rack up high scores. The scores are based on how well players can fold molecules to produce the lowest-energy state — the state that is preferred in nature.

Just a couple of months ago, UW researchers credited Foldit players with figuring out the right structure for an enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. The latest research focuses on the processes used by the players rather than the results.

Players trade recipes
Starting in mid-2009, Foldit's developers made it possible for players to create and share their own algorithms for manipulating molecules automatically. The gamers refer to these software routines as "recipes."

"A lot of them have been shared with their own teammates, of course, and also with the players that they're competing against," UW biochemist Firas Khatib, a co-author for the paper, told me. "In some of the descriptions, they say, 'You might want to put the kettle on for this one,' or 'You might want to let this one run for a few days.'"

Over the months that followed, Foldit players tinkered with the recipes to produce tastier molecules with less time and effort.

"The whole thing was a social process," Cooper explained. "It's really drawing on the collective intelligence of the Foldit players as a whole, to come up with the algorithms and also decide which ones are useful."

Blue Fuse became one of the most popular recipes among the gamers. Khatib said the software tool takes the code for a molecule folded in a particular way, and bends the rules of the game temporarily to check whether there's an even better solution to the puzzle. If there is, the software slowly brings the rules back and heads for that better solution instead. "That's literally how simple the algorithm is, which is why it's so brilliant," Khatib said.

Researchers conduct cook-off
It turned out that Blue Fuse was similar to an algorithm in the more sophisticated Rosetta program, known as Fast Relax. That algorithm was a new, improved (but unpublished) version of an older software tool called Classic Relax. The researchers staged a recipe cook-off to see how the three algorithms compared. Blue Fuse took less time to come up with a low-energy solution to a given protein puzzle than Classic Relax, but more time than the improved Fast Relax.

That wasn't the end of the cook-off, however. "One of the reviewers for our paper pointed out that that's a completely unfair competition," Khatib said.

The reviewer observed that Fast Relax was taking advantage of software routines in Rosetta that were not available in Foldit. When the UW researchers adapted Fast Relax for the Foldit program, they found that Blue Fuse identified low-energy puzzle solutions faster — although Fast Relax could find even lower-energy solutions if it was allowed to run for more than 200 seconds of CPU time. (The average Blue Fuse runtime during gameplay was 122 seconds.)

"For 200 seconds and less, Blue Fuse is actually better than Fast Relax," Khatib said. "It optimizes faster."

Baker said the next step is to give the gamers more power. "What we're doing now is taking many more of the Rosetta options and parameters and exposing them to Foldit players, so that they can use them. ... I'm really excited to see what Foldit players can do once they have access to the full palette of options," he told me.

He said it won't be all that long before the Foldit players are recruited not only to solve protein-folding puzzles, but also to try out molecular designs that could lead to "new virus inhibitors, new carbon-fixation pathways, new routes to vaccines."

"We're now learning enough of the rules that we can actually make our own proteins," Baker said.

Update for 5:45 p.m. ET: The creator of the Blue Fuse "recipe," a Foldit player known as Vertex, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email. (Foldit players traditionally prefer not to be identified by their real-world names.) Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: What’s your background? Are you the sort of person who deals with molecule-manipulating algorithms for your day job, or is this something generally foreign to you?

Vertex: I'm a retired software engineer, so I know nothing about biochemistry. I wrote Blue Fuse primarily to launch new Foldit puzzles — light the blue fuse and stand back. It was quickly taken up by the Foldit community as a credibility test on new protein shapes generated by the rebuild toolset. Its success in this role is far beyond anything I originally imagined or expected, but this is the key strength of the Foldit democracy — it is natural selection at its very best. Dozens of bright ideas are brought to life through the vision, creativity and collaboration of the players. And then, in recipe form, the scripts fly or die when others use them.

Blue Fuse spawned from Acid Tweeker, a brilliant grandfather script from the genius of Stephen Pletsch, and now has many children of its own. To 'Fuze' has even become a Foldit verb. It's a crazy success story for Blue Fuse, but Foldit is a place where game play meets bioengineering and the next flash of inspiration can come from literally anywhere.

Q: What process did you use to come up with the algorithm? Is it a question of math, or a question of visualization?

A: The development of Blue Fuse was a small exercise in statistics. In Foldit there is an adjustable parameter, "clash behavior," that controls how well the Foldit toolset tolerates proximity between protein side chains. Setting the clash behavior low allows the protein to compress, but at the expense of the overall energy score. Blue Fuse manipulates the clash behavior through various compressions and relaxations. I tried different clash values on the start positions of three puzzles and recorded the scores for a wide range of samples. An unexpected result was the discovery that the best clash values were significantly different for the three puzzles, so I had to choose values that on probability gave a good outcome. I could have made Blue Fuse a bigger script with more combinations, but I wanted a quick answer more than anything else.

Q: Could you explain for a newbie like me exactly what the algorithm does?

A: The core idea is that the clash behavior is adjusted down to a carefully selected level, and the protein is allowed to compress and is then shaken. The clash behaviour is then set back to normal, and the protein is allowed to decompress. This is very much more gentle on the overall shape of the protein than the scripts that use "bands" to compress the structure — which can cause undesired distortions. Blue Fuse is a deliberately simple set of actions based on this core idea. It has been developed to be fast. It will very quickly let you discover if a new shape is fundamentally OK or not.

Q: Has the tool evolved substantially since its creation?

A: Blue Fuse itself has not changed since I posted it, but there are many children citing Blue Fuse as parent, using variations on the core idea. Firas could say how many, but I think it may be as many as 60. I too have a design for a new version of Blue Fuse that will improve its performance — I can't ignore the challenge that Fast Relax is out ahead right now.

Q: The paper indicates that Blue Fuse and other recipes are used in conjunction with human-guided manipulation, and that it’s not a strictly automatic process. Is that pretty much the way it works? How long does it generally take to run the tool?

A: Correct. Blue Fuse is typically used by Foldit players to test the results of the rebuild tool. The choice of what section of the protein to rebuild, and which outcomes are worth testing, are normally human decisions. There are very sophisticated recipes that automate these selection tasks and embed "Fuzers" to test outcomes, but they are generally used to fine-tune a shape rather than perform major surgery. A primary goal of Foldit is to capture ways of automating the human element, and huge progress has been made on this, but judgment of good shape remains our edge over the machine.

The time taken by Blue Fuse varies enormously, depending on the size of the protein and the power of the player's computer. For me it typically takes about a minute. This is fast for a Foldit script.

Q: I’m wondering if there are things that could be adapted from Blue Fuse to Fast Relax or other tools used in other protein-folding software, or more generally, to mathematics and engineering challenges that aren’t directly connected to protein folding.

A: Yes. Blue Fuse (and children) and Fast Relax are actually convergent. Everyone competes and collaborates at the same time. Evolution and natural selection will decide the best script.

Foldit is part of the GWAP ("games with a purpose") world. There are many ways that crowdsourcing through game-play is already bringing a fresh approach to all kinds of academic challenge. Foldit does this supremely well for protein structure. It's an amazing tool. The Foldit community has already solved important biological proteins that previously had unknown structures, and has helped design new proteins for medical research. I would expect this important work to continue strongly in the future, and we will get better at it. I would also expect substantial progress to be made in the automation of protein structure prediction tools — both in Foldit and in the broader academic world, of course.

More about Foldit and other games with a purpose:

• Gamers solve puzzle that baffled scientists
• Foldit players attack protein-folding puzzles
• Play a game and engineer real RNA
• Fight disease by playing a game
• Xbox's Kinect could improve surgery
• Help scientists decipher a 'lost' gospel
• Join a worldwide planet search
• Look for icy worlds over the Internet
• Gamification transforms life into play
• Still more research games from Zooniverse
• SETI @ home and much more from BOINC

In addition to Khatib, Cooper, Popovic and Baker, co-authors of "Algorithm Discovery by Protein Folding Game Players" include Michael Tyka, Kefan Xu, Ilya Makedon and Foldit players.  The Foldit project was developed by the UW Center for Game Science in collaboration with UW's Baker Laboratory, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Adobe and Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Last updated 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20:

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

Unraveling a retrovirus
For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus' spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature's locks.

The problem is that enzymes are far tougher to crack than your typical lock. There are millions of ways that the bonds between the atoms in the enzyme's molecules could twist and turn. To design the right chemical key, you have to figure out the most efficient, llowest-energy configuration for the molecule — the one that Mother Nature herself came up with.

That's where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn't reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.

More than 236,000 players have registered for the game since its debut in 2008.

The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said.

Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"

They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days," Khatib said.

University of Washington

A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular puzzle.

One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme.

"Standard autobuilding and structure refinement methods showed within hours that the solution was almost certainly correct," the researchers reported in the paper published today. "Using the Foldit solution, the final refined structure was completed a few days later."

Khatib said the Seattle team's collaborators in Poland were in such a celebratory mood that they insisted on organizing a simultaneous champagne toast, shared over a Skype video teleconference.

"Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem," Khatib and his colleagues wrote.

The parts of the molecule that formed the floppy loop turned out to be of particular interest. "These features provide exciting opportunities for the design of retroviral drugs, including AIDS drugs," the researchers said.

Looking for new problems to solve
The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels. "My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases," Khatib said.

He's not alone in that hope. "Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries," Zoran Popovic, director of University of Washington's Center for Game Science, said in today's news release. "We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science are taught in school."

That's something that Carter Kimsey, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Biological Infrastructure, would love to see happen. "After this discovery, young people might not mind doing their science homework," she quipped.

One caveat, though: Playing Foldit isn't exactly like playing Bejeweled. "Let's be honest, proteins aren't the sexiest video game out there," Khatib told me. Give the game a whirl, and let me know whether it's addictive or a drag.

Tale of a Contender
The final decisive move in the Foldit Contender Group's solution to the monkey-virus puzzle involved twisting around that floppy loop, or "flap," in the structure of the enzyme. The paper published today notes that one of the Contenders, nicknamed "mimi," built upon the work done by other gamers to make that move. I got in touch with mimi via email, and here's the wonderfully detailed response she sent back today from Britain:

"I have been playing Foldit for nearly three years, and I have been in the Contenders team for two and a half years.

"Although there are 35 names on the members list on the website, when you take off duplicate names and non-active players, it comes down to about 12 to 15 people.

"The team members come from a wide range of backgrounds, chiefly scientific or IT [information technology], although our best player is from neither.

"One of the main features of Foldit is the ability to communicate via chat within the game. There is both global chat, which everyone can access, and individual group chat, which allows team members to talk easily to one another. The Contenders are spread out between Canada, USA, UK, Europe and New Zealand, so this is essential.

"Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores higher than the top solo score.

"The game is not only an interesting intellectual challenge, allowing you to use your problem-solving skills, 'feel' for protein shapes, and whatever biochemical knowledge you have to obtain a solution to each puzzle, but it also provides a unique society of players driven by both individual and team rivalry with an overall purpose of improving the game and the results achieved. A body of knowledge has been built up in the Wiki by contributions from players, and ideas are constantly fed back to the game designers.

"In the case of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, I had looked at the structure of the options we were presented with and identified that it would be better if the 'flap' could be made to sit closer to the body of the protein — one of the basic rules of folding is to make the protein as compact as possible — but when I tried this with my solo solution, I couldn't get it to work. However, when I applied the same approach to the evolved solution that had been worked on by other team members, I was able to get it to tuck in, and that proved to be the answer to the structure. I believe that it was the changes made by my colleagues that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort.

"We were all very excited to hear that we had helped to find the answer to this crystal form, especially since it had been outstanding so long and other methods had been unsuccessful. The feeling of having done something that could make a significant contribution to research in this field is very special and unexpected. Foldit players have achieved a number of successes so far, and I hope we will go on to make many more.

"You may be aware that we asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually.

"Many of the people playing the game are known only by their user name, even within a team.

"I would be grateful if you could refer to me as 'mimi' rather than using my full name."

Update for 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: I've added an MSNBC video about the Foldit project, and I've also heard back via email from another one of the Contenders, a player known as "Bletchley Park":

"We are all very excited about the discovery, to see the story unfold now is very gratifying. The main motivator of the Contenders group, and most Foldit players for that matter, is the advancement of science. It is very typical for mimi not to have her real name listed or even to claim the discovery as her own.

"Contenders is a group of like-minded individuals. The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation and perseverance. Most of us have been 'folding' for several hours each day over the past years.

"To be part of this adventure is a very fulfilling experience. Quite a few of us have or have had family members who suffered from the modern terminal diseases and find energy in those experiences to keep folding with the intention to make a difference."

More games for science:

• Play a game and engineer real RNA
• Fight disease by playing a game
• Xbox's Kinect could improve surgery
• Help scientists decipher a 'lost' gospel
• Join a worldwide planet search
• Look for icy worlds over the Internet
• Still more research games from Zooniverse
• SETI @ home and much more from BOINC

In addition to Khatib, DiMaio, Cooper, Popovic and the Foldit Contenders Group, the authors of "Crystal Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players" include the Foldit Void Crushers Group, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Miroslaw Gilski, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zabranska, Iva Pichova, James Thompson, Mariusz Jaskolski and David Baker. The authors also acknowledged "the members of the Foldit team for their help designing and developing the game and all the Foldit players and Rosetta @ home volunteers who have made this work possible."

The work was supported by UW's Center for Game Science, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Czech Ministry of Education, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft Corp. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Foldit was created by computer scientists at the Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW's Baker Laboratory.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

What do you get when you cross a WorldWide Telescope with a Kinect motion-sensing game controller? You get the “universe at your fingertips,” according to Microsoft Research’s Curtis Wong, who demonstrated the gesture-controlled cosmos today at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas.

Actually, having the universe at your fingertips is how Wong has thought of the freely available WorldWide Telescope project since it was first unveiled in 2008. The software, which is freely available through a Web-based interface and as a standalone program, displays the night sky and lets users zoom in on cosmic imagery from a wide variety of sources. You can even go on 3-D fly-throughs of distant galaxies, or create your own tours of celestial hot spots.

But back then, Wong was talking in terms of fingertips tapping on a keyboard or guiding a computer mouse. Now, thanks to the Microsoft's Kinect controller, he can control the cosmos on a trio of high-definition video projectors, just by waving his hands in the air. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

"If I just move my fingers out about a half-inch, the earth suddenly begins zooming in, more and more. ... Then I bring my fingers together, and the earth retreats," Wong told me.

The effect is similar to the hand-waving tricks that Tom Cruise's character used to manipulate virtual displays in the movie "Minority Report" — only better, at least in Wong's estimation. "First of all, Tom Cruise had to wear these funny gloves with lights on them," Wong said. "We don't have to do that. ... We have a lot more control than he did. He had to move things on a 2-D surface and rotate them."

Subtle gestures can be coupled with voice commands to navigate through a 3-D computer model of the universe. You can set a planet spinning or change the perspective on our Local Group of galaxies just by moving your fingers, hands or arms. "The motions that we're doing with the universe are fairly subtle," Wong said.

The sky's not the limit
The system capitalizes on Kinect's multiple-sensor, hands-free gaming system, which processes depth data as well as audio and 2-D video as a way of letting users interact with 3-D virtual worlds through gestures, jumps and other body movements. The system has already been hacked to create virtual-reality superheroes, sign-language translators, seeing-eye guides for the blind and even touch-sensitive robo-surgeons.

In recognition of Kinect's hackability, Microsoft is planning to release a non-commercial software development kit for Kinect sometime this spring. Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, told me that the kit is "on track" to ship within weeks. Wong declined to lay out a timetable for making the Kinect connection available to WorldWide Telescope users, but it would make sense if it rolled out at about the same time as the software development kit.

The most obvious setting for a Kinect-enabled planetarium program would be in a classroom — or, come to think of it, in an actual planetarium, where a teacher or guide could control a sky show from center stage rather than from behind a computer monitor. Home users could conceivably get a kick out of flying through the virtual solar system via a Kinect controller and a big-screen TV. And there might be an eventual payoff for PC users as well. Gupta told me that Kinect's developers were thinking about "not just the 10-foot experience, but the 2-foot experience."

Of course, the new possibilities would apply to PC gamers as well: In addition to the WorldWide Telescope demo, today's MIX11 session featured a Kinect-powered "Wall Panic" PC game, in which players contort their bodies to match a series of Tetris-style shapes that flash on a large screen.

Looking farther down the software development road, Gupta gushed about potential applications ranging from yoga instruction to remote-controlled robotics. "I think the possibilities are endless," he told me. "We are looking to the community to see how they put this to use."

More about sky software:

• Sharing the Google Sky
• Science thrives in virtual worlds
• Planet hunters sift through data
• Biggest picture of the sky unveiled

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Using a game controller to interact with real-world objects is definitely spooky. You push around a glorified pencil to "feel" the contours of a hand resting on a faraway table. And if that faraway hand moves, you'll feel an unseen force push back. It's as if an occult hand were taking control of the magic pencil from yards or miles away.

The push of a ghostly hand, vs. the virtual sense of touch ... it's not easy for me to say which aspect of the University of Washington's Kinect-based robo-control system is spookier. But it's easy for Fredrik Ryden to say which aspect is more useful.

"We want to give robotic surgeons a sense of touch," the visiting graduate student from Sweden told me.

The point of Ryden's contraption is not merely to manipulate objects over far distances. Heck, even a monkey can use a thought-controlled robotic arm to pick up distant objects, and surgeons have been operating remote-controlled robotic scalpels for years. But it takes a more sophisticated kind of robot to give those surgeons tactile feedback about how deep they're cutting, and create a virtual force field to keep their scalpels from straying.

The fact that Ryden's robo-touch system could demonstrate that capability after just a weekend's worth of work, using a $150 motion-sensing game device, adds to the experiment's geek appeal.

"I realized what I was doing was really cool, but it was easy — so I was surprised that nobody else had done it," Ryden said.

Now that the feat has been publicized on YouTube, in the blogosphere and beyond, it seems as if everyone is trying to do it, said Howard Jay Chizeck, an engineering professor who's co-director of the University of Washington's Biorobotics Laboratory. "The sense I have is that we're just a little bit ahead of whoever is right behind us," he joked.

How it works
Microsoft (which is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture) sells the Kinect system as a "controller-less" controller for its XBox video game console. Players can interact with their games by gesturing, punching, jumping or even dancing in front of an infrared laser projector and a set of infrared depth sensors. Kinect's software analyzes the patterns of scattered infrared light to create a 3-D "cloud" of data points that reflect the players' changing positions in real time.

It didn't take long for computer geeks to hack into the Kinect system for a wide spectrum of unanticipated applications, ranging from "Air Guitar Hero" and a virtual-reality piano to extreme body jiggling and other risque pursuits. On the serious side, an outfit called Virtopsy has programmed Kinect to serve as a touch-free interface for medical imagery in operating-room environments. And then there's the Biorobotics Laboratory's hack.

Under the direction of UW's Blake Hannaford, the lab has been working for years to develop better robotic surgeons for military as well as civilian use. Surgical robots are already widely used for delicate operations such as prostate removal, but medical experts in the military (and at NASA) would love to have robots that can do a wide range of surgical operations by remote control, from hundreds of miles away.

So the Biorobotics Lab was challenged to come up with a system that could provide real-time feedback to the surgeons at the robot's controls — including a way to warn the surgeons if they were getting too close to a vital artery or some other danger zone.

Think of it as a 21st-century, virtual-reality "Operation" game with real-world consequences. Bzzzzt!

"Essentially, you're projecting a sense of touch through an image," Chizeck explained. "We'd like to have images of things generate 'force fields' around things you don't want to touch."

When the Kinect system came out in November, Ryden saw it as the perfect platform for such a device. His software translates the cloud of data points into a virtual 3-D surface. When the magic pencil (actually, a software-controlled stylus at the end of a robotic arm) "hits" the virtual surface, it moves no farther — just as if it were hitting the real surface of a faraway hand. The same thing can happen if your stylus strays up to the edge of the force field. (Though actually, if you press hard enough, you can push the stylus through the force field. It feels as if you're poking a pin through a piece of virtual cardboard.)

What it's for
The robo-touch system is currently being fine-tuned as part of the Biorobotics Lab's long-running project on surgical robotics. The beauty part is that buying Kinect systems doesn't strain the lab's hardware budget, Chizeck said. "It's 150 bucks for a system that would cost maybe $100,000 or $150,000 to reproduce," he said.

That doesn't mean low-cost Kinects will be showing up in operating rooms. The low-cost devices don't have anywhere near the resolution that the actual robo-touch device would require. Eventually, super-sensitive touch feedback systems will be built from the ground up and put through clinical trials, as part of a long and potentially expensive development process.

"You're talking at least a decade," Chizeck said. "I think in Fredrik's lifetime, it's a sure bet, but it's really hard to predict." (Fredrik Ryden is 22 years old.)

Hannaford told me that surgical robotics may turn out to be the "killer app" for the field of haptics, which focuses on methods for translating virtual-reality shapes into a real-world sense of touch. (Maybe "killer app" isn't the best phrase to use when talking about medical procedures, but you get the point.)

Chizeck had a slightly different take: "I'll make a bet with Blake," he said. "I think there'll be a game application using haptics before there's a patient operated on."

He said robo-touch technology could also be used to create more dexterous bomb-disposal robots and deep-sea autonomous vehicles. But there's one obvious application that no one in the lab was willing to discuss: the use of haptics for long-distance, virtual-reality sex.

"I'll let you think of your own apps," Chizeck said.

More on gaming and virtual reality:

• Virtual haven set up for combat vets
• 'Star Wars' holograms nearly a reality
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• Kinect hacks unleash your inner superhero

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Elke Rogersdotter / Univ. of Gothenburg

Play was an important part of people's everyday lives at Mohenjo-Daro in Indus Valley 4,000 years ago.

Games of leisure played a key part of life 4,000 years ago in the Indus Valley of present-day Pakistan, according to an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who found that dice and other game pieces make up nearly 10 percent of the artifacts recovered in the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro.

Archaeologists often recover play-related artifacts, but usually dismiss them as unimportant for research or regard them as ritual objects or signs of social status, says Elke Rogersdotter, who studied the play-related artifacts for her doctoral thesis.

She argues that studying play can give archaeologists insight to the social structure of ancient societies. For example, at Mohenjo-Daro, not only is there an abundance of play-related objects, they also appear to follow a repetitive pattern of spatial distribution. This may indicate specific locations where games were played, such as gaming parlors.

"The marked quantity of play-related finds and the structured distribution shows that playing was already an important part of people's everyday lives more than 4,000 years ago," she said in a news release.

Cubical dice were the most widely found items, but archaeologists have also unearthed balls and marbles, conical gamesmen, "long dice" and casting bones — as well as what seem to be game boards made from bricks. Some experts have speculated that a game similar to ancient Mesopotamia's "Royal Game of Ur" was played at Mohenjo-Daro.   

Mohenjo-Daro is the largest urban settlement from the Bronze Age in the Indus Valley, a cultural complex of the same era as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have found the site difficult to interpret because they haven't found remains of temples or palaces, which makes it difficult to determine how the settlement was managed and what distinguished the elite.

For more information, check out Rogersdotter's thesis, which has been successfully defended.

Wan et al. / Science / AAAS

Functional MRI brain scans show activation in an area of the brain known as the precuneus, as exhibited here by a professional shogi player when presented with a board game pattern.

If you have a knack for knowing just the right move to make — in a board game or in other walks of life — it might be because your brain has built up a special kind of connection.

Researchers at Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute report evidence that the professional players of a chesslike board game from Japan, known as shogi, have brains that crackle with activity in two areas that are less active in amateurs. Their findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

The activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, while professionals and amateurs were shown pictures of shogi board patterns. Shogi is regarded as a game as cerebral and as tricky to master as chess — perhaps even more tricky, because players can add pieces captured from an opponent to their own side. The professionals were more adept at intuitively recognizing the "next best move" for a given pattern, but the really interesting part of this game had to do with what went on in their brains.

Wan et al. / Science / AAAS

This fMRI scan highlights activity in the caudate nucleus of a professional shogi player.

The pros' brains showed more activity in the precuneus region of the parietal lobe, which has been linked to pattern recognition, as well as in the head of the caudate nucleus, deep within the brain. The caudate nucleus has been previously linked with cognitive functions, and game-playing in particular In fact, a different team of researchers reported last year that people who showed an aptitude for arcade games tended to have a bigger caudate nucleus (along with other structures) than less skilled players.

The research team found that the precuneus-caudate connection showed up consistently when professionals were asked to come up with a rapid-fire choice of moves, but not as much for the amateurs. "These results suggest that the precuneus-caudate circuit implements the automatic, yet complicated, processes of board-pattern perception and next-move generation in board game experts," the researchers reported.

Does this mean good gamers are born, not made? And do these results apply only to shogi players? In an e-mail interview, I asked one of the leaders of the research team, Keiji Tanaka, to discuss the findings in greater depth. Here's an edited Q&A:

JNTO

Shogi is a chesslike board game that is commonly played in Japan.

Cosmic Log: Last year, I wrote about research from a team led by the University of Pittsburgh's Kirk Erickson that indicated a correlation between skill in playing an arcade-type video game and the relative volume of the caudate nucleus and putamen. This study seems to confirm the idea that structure of the caudate nucleus plays a role in game-playing proficiency … would you agree?

Keiji Tanaka: Firstly, we measured the volume of caudate nucleus and compared the measure between professional and amateur players. There was no difference. Secondly, the game of Erickson et al. is largely sensory-motor, whereas board games are purely cognitive. There is thus little commonality between the two "games," although they are both called games. Thirdly, the learning examined in Erickson et al. took place within 24 hours. In our case, even the amateur players have spent many years learning the play, although their training is less extensive than that of professional players. The extent of learning is many orders different between our case and Erickson et al. Therefore, our results are not at all related to those of Erickson et al.

Q: You and your colleagues suggest that expert players take advantage of neural connections between the precuneus and the caudate nucleus to recognize a game pattern quickly and intuitively arrive at a "next best move." Did you see evidence of a temporal progression, or was the experiment not designed to chart the flow of neural impulses in that way? Did you arrive at this hypothesis merely by considering the roles traditionally assigned to those areas of the brain

A: There was significantly stronger positive correlation between precuneus activations and caudate activations during the quick-generation task in professional players, compared with correlations during other tasks in professional players, and compared with correlations during the quick generation task in amateur players. This is the evidence from our own experiments.

Our results do not indicate the direction of signal flow (from the precuneus to the caudate or opposite).  The previous anatomical studies (in monkeys) showed that there are direct projections from the precuneus to the part of the caudate nucleus. Also, it has been shown that the precuneus has projections from the visual cortical areas in the occipital cortex, but the caudate nucleus does not have projections from the visual cortical areas. Based on these previous findings, we suggest that the signal flows from the precuneus to the caudate.

Q: What further experiments are you planning to follow up on the suggestions raised in this paper?

A: We are conducting a few follow-up experiments, but we would like to introduce them after we get results.

Q: Are there implications for neuroscience beyond game-playing? For example, will learning about this particular process with Shogi shed light on the way in which experts in other fields (business, for example) make seemingly instinctual snap decisions about successful strategies in other scenarios?

A: We assume that the same circuit (precuneus to caudate) is essential for other types of cognitive expertise — for example, chess, MRI reading by radiologists, solving troubles in computer networks, and auditing. However, we have no direct evidence. The research was supported by Fujitsu, which is one of the biggest computer companies in Japan. They want to get hints from our study about the best ways to educate system engineers who solve the troubles in computer networks. The engineers largely depend on intuition.

Q: Are expert shogi-players born or made? Do your results suggest that proficiency at determining the "next best move" is an innate faculty, hard-wired into the brains of experts? Or could it be that experts have strengthened the neural connections for instinctive play through practice? Some of your results point to a correlation between caudate activity in amateurs and the speed with which they select the best move, which might suggest that some brains are naturally built to play shogi better. What’s your view on this "nature vs. nurture" aspect of game-playing proficiency?

A: Our results do not give a direct answer to the nature-vs.-nurture question. However, previous psychological studies have shown that the expertise is specific to the domain. Chess players are super only in chess, MRI-reading experts are super only in MRI reading, and so on. Also, the psychological studies have shown that the development of expertise requires a long period of training, more than 10 years. These characteristics — domain specificity and the long period of learning that's required — are more consistent with the nurture idea: Expertise is the result of long, serious training.

If that's not food for thought, I don't know what is. Feel free to cogitate over this research and add your comments below.

More on brains and games:

• Interactive: A road map for your brain
• How playing games change your brain
• Games ease trauma — but not just any game
• Brain games don't make you smarter, study says

In addition to Tanaka, authors of "The Neural Basis of Intuitive Best Next-Move Generation in Board Game Experts" include Xiaohong Wan, Hironori Nakatani, Kenichi Ueno, Takeshi Asamizuya and Kang Cheng. The work was supported by Fujitsu Laboratories and a grant-in-aid from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The Japan Shogi Association participated in the study.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle). Boyle has also written a book about Pluto as well as the past and present search for planets. To learn more, click your way to the website for "The Case for Pluto."

McGill University

Players of the online puzzle game Phylo will help researchers understand the origin of genetic disease.

Video games might make some of us fat and depressed, but Canadian researchers are hoping gamers will find an online puzzle challenge addictive enough to help them figure out the origins of genetic diseases.

The game, called Phylo, works by helping researchers identify sections of DNA that are similar across species and contribute to traits such as blue eyes -- or medical conditions such as heart disease. By pinpointing these regions, scientists hope to trace the source of certain genetic diseases.

It turns out that humans are much better than computers at recognizing these types of patterns. Lead researcher Jerome Waldispuhl and his colleagues at McGill University built Phylo to capitalize on that fact.

They aren't the first scientists to harness idle people and their pattern-recognition prowess to achieve research goals. There's the University of Washington's protein folding game Foldit, for example. There's also Galaxy Zoo, which tasks users to classify galaxies according to shape. (A spin-off called Moon Zoo focuses on lunar craters.)

In Phylo, gamers are tasked to align rows of colored blocks that represent the four letters of the genetic code (A, C, G, T) from two organisms. Perfect alignment is usually not possible. Instead, gamers are given a time limit to come up with the best match. That pairing will likely include mismatches and gaps -- which serve as the source of potential genetic mutations.

"We're hoping that people will enjoy playing the game and that many participants will sign up," Waldispuhl said in a news release. "This is an opportunity for people to use their free time to contribute in an extremely important way to medical research."

To help the game spread, the team plans to integrate it with Facebook ... and steal attention from the popular game FarmVille.

More about gaming for science:

• Gamers solve protein puzzles
• How games change your brain
• Play the galactic slots with Galaxy Zoo
• Video games improve decision-making skills
• Games ease trauma -- but not just any game

For more about Phylo, check out the reports from Wired.com's Lisa Grossman and the Montreal Gazette's Peggy Curran.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).