After helping solve molecular puzzles that baffled scientists for years to help find a cure for AIDS, gamers have another reason to stick another feather on their cap. Their obsessive compulsive behavior and sharp focus on repetitive tasks makes them perfect for unraveling proteins, deciphering ancient texts and even search the stars.

Players of the game Planet Hunters monitor the changing brightness of stars over time. When a planet travels in front of the star, the light ceases and the during the duration of that, they can measure how big the planet that moved in front of the star. These were captured by the Kepler telescope.

The Kepler space telescope was launched back in 2009 and orbiting our world for three years, the Kepler focused its lens on a group of stars near the constellaton Cygnus in search for habitable Earth-like planets.

For just around four million games, the players have discovered 69 possible planets in which the Kepler team sifted through. The players that helped in discovering the two new possible planets are credited in a report published in Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.

Crowd-sourcing can help scientific and historical discoveries by tapping the human mind because "human classiers have a remarkable ability to recognize archetypes and to assemble groups of similar objects, while disregarding obvious glitches that can trip up computer algorithms." According to the Public Kepler Research Data Report.

Another example of scientific progress is the success of players in modeling a retroviral protease which could help in the search for the cure for AIDS and other retroviral diseases. They did it within ten days where a team of scientists can't solve it for years. Using a program called Foldit. The gaming community will do it again with another program called Phylo which manipulates a series of DNA. The program also lets players choose which disease they want to be treated.

Now players all around the world can grind away the hours in seemingly meaningless repetitive tasks but might end up saving the world.