A new online science game allows the general public to directly contribute to Alzheimer’s disease research and help scientists search for a cure.
The game, called Stall Catchers, was developed by the Human Computation Institute, in collaboration with UC Berkeley and other institutions, as part of the EyesOnALZ citizen science project. Stall Catchers will allow participants to look at movies of real blood vessels in mouse brains and search for clogged capillaries, or stalls, where blood is no longer flowing, Previous research suggests that capillary stalls could be a key culprit in Alzheimer’s disease.
The citizen science approach for Stall Catchers was developed by physicist Andrew Westphal, a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. The approach was first used in a project called Stardust@home, developed here at Space Sciences Lab, in which more than 30,000 amateur scientists have carried out more than 100 million searches to identify interstellar dust in collectors returned by the NASA Stardust comet sampling mission. Stardust@home led to the discovery of seven particles of likely interstellar origin, reported in the journal Science in 2014.
You can read more about Stall Catchers in a Berkeley News article.
