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Gamers Come Together To Help Map The Human Eye
For the past 50 years, neuroscientists have been trying to figure out how the human eye is capable of tracking movement, and with the help of gamers and MIT, scientists are closer than ever.
Neuroscientists have been trying to map the eye's neural network in an attempt to solve the mystery, but it's an incredibly complicated and detailed process. According to Popsci, it would take 100 people working 24 hours a day seven days a week half a million years to do it. To speed up the process a bit, MIT scientists developed s program called EyeWire, a program that works like a game that lets players navigate a single nerve’s path across a tiny section of a mouse's eyeball. It's a little similar to the Folding@home project on PlayStation where players can loan out their PlayStation 3's processing power to help understand the nature of protein folding, except EyeWire is an interactive game where Folding@home was a passive experience.
You can check it out and sign up to play here. Basically, players fills in the the path of a nerve through an eyeball by clicking the appropriate areas and submitting their work. You can see how many people are playing, ask questions about the process in the live chat, and take watch the leaderboards to see who has the high scores. The top scorers at the moment are Swiss and American players.
[Source: EyeWire.org, Popsci]
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