If you’ve ever want to contribute to the betterment of mankind, but also sort of just wanted to play video games instead, Gearbox has the perfect compromise, courtesy of its new Borderlands Science initiative – which, long story short, lets you organise corrupted poop data in order to assist the scientific community.
Borderlands Science might have lofty goals, but it takes the form of a jaunty little puzzle game that can now be accessed from a new arcade machine aboard Borderlands 3’s Sanctuary III. The simple aim of the game is to sort coloured tiles into ordered lines, which probably doesn’t sound all that science-y on the face of it.
However, the key to all of this is what’s going on beneath Borderlands 3’s colourful block-shifting facade. In reality, each block puzzle is based on strands of microbe DNA, and solving puzzles will ultimate help scientists identify different microbes found without the human body.
Borderlands 3 – Borderlands Science Official Trailer Watch on YouTube
As outlined in the illuminating introductory video above, scientists have already sequenced millions of strands of microbe DNA from tens of thousands of human poop samples, but in order to be useful the data needs to be properly organised. Computers have already started this task, but the ambiguity inherent in similar microbes’ DNA means that errors inevitably arise – which could impact analysis further down the line.