Crowdsourcing AIDS, Politics: Power to the Online People infographic

Written by aNewDomain Staff

Power to the Online People infographic. Whoa! Thanks to the sheer numbers of world citizens online now, gamers solved a thorny AIDs research problem … what else is possible in the virtual continent of the Internet, which is bigger than the populations of North America, Central America and the Middle East combined? Amazing.

It should not blow our minds, but it does anyway. Look at these stats. Gamers took days to solve an AIDS research problem that’d been tormenting scientists for more than a decade. And would you believe there are now more Internet-connected devices than people on Earth?

The extraordinary power of the virtual Internet continent — with a population the size of North America, Latin America and the countries in the Middle East combined — really shows through in this Power to the Online People infographic. Credit and special thanks to: Opensite.org

The fact that gamers in a few days solved a sticky proteomics problem world scientists have been pondering for years in AIDS research alone is a staggering data point of this graphic. Holy cow. That was fast. What’s next?