Play Foldit, the game that helped its designers win a Nobel Prize

You may know that biochemist David Baker shares the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with two researchers from Google's DeepMind. But a video game helped get them there, and you can still play -- and contribute to science -- even today. Baker and the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design led the team to create fold.it, an online puzzle game in which players actually design synthetic proteins. Originally, the game was coded to allow players to help determine the structure of existing proteins, beginning in 2008. In 2019, the project expanded to allow gamers to actually design new proteins that had never before existed.