They know all about saving fictional worlds, but gamers are now being called upon by researchers to lend a hand in one of humankind's biggest crises--the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, they have risen to the occasion and delivered the equivalent of 471 years of work. In the multiplayer space opera EVE Online, a mini-game called Project Discovery doubles as a citizen science platform, studying the human immune system's response to the novel coronavirus. Participants take on data analysis through gameplay that helps researchers isolate specific patterns as predictors of disease severity. The project is a collaboration with McGill University, the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Northwestern University computer scientists are aiming to speed up treatments and vaccines for COVID-19--by making researchers' jobs easier. The team has developed a new tool that searches through scientific literature, predicting the most useful results for each user. After pulling documents of interest, the tool then uses artificial intelligence to generate a short, easy-to-skim summary of each paper. "Researchers can spend hours combing through documents and reading peer-reviewed papers," said Ning Wang, a graduate student who developed the tool. "Our tool provides the most salient details for academic articles rather than simply retrieving them. We hope this will be a time saver for researchers, guiding them to key information."