Pinboard (guardiantech)

Hunting for an E.T. castoff in a most terrestrial place >> NYTimes.com

guardiantech — 2013-06-24T21:29:39+00:00

ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico — You are the world’s greatest video game maker, but suddenly you find yourself stuck with millions of cartridges of a game nobody wants. What do you do?
You load the cartridges into trucks and bury them in the New Mexico desert.
Atari did just that almost 30 years ago, or so the story goes. The truth lies beneath packed dirt and poured concrete in a sleeping landfill by the railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s here, where this city of about 32,000, home to an Air Force base and the state’s Museum of Space History, dumped its garbage many years ago.

Is it a legend? Truth? They're going to dig to find out. Really.

All the world’s a game >> The Economist

guardiantech — 2011-12-09T06:28:18+00:00

Be impressed: "Over the past two decades the video-games business has gone from a cottage industry selling to a few niche customers to a fully grown branch of the entertainment industry. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts (see chart below). PwC predicts that video games will be the fastest-growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015."

Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists >> Cosmic Log

guardiantech — 2011-09-18T21:16:27+00:00

"Video game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"'This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS,' Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, said. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology."