<story><title>OpenWorm: A Digital Organism In Your Browser</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openworm/openworm-a-digital-organism-in-your-browser</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Micand</author><text>I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I&amp;#x27;m glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.&lt;p&gt;1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you&amp;#x27;re trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.&lt;p&gt;2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I&amp;#x27;ve seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; part of &amp;quot;OpenWorm.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students&amp;#x2F;postdocs&amp;#x2F;whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?&lt;p&gt;4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can&amp;#x27;t typeset or capitalize the species&amp;#x27; name properly (&amp;quot;C. Elegans&amp;quot;) in their video, that doesn&amp;#x27;t lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere &amp;quot;1000 cells&amp;quot; in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.</text></comment>
<story><title>OpenWorm: A Digital Organism In Your Browser</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openworm/openworm-a-digital-organism-in-your-browser</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Lambdanaut</author><text>This project is huge. I&amp;#x27;m glad to see it has come this far. It&amp;#x27;s the first ever simulation of a multi-cellular organism at a really useful detail, presented and made available to the masses.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s work like this that is going to help explode the use of citizen scientist work. Imagine being able to run your own experiments on a simulation first without having to buy and breed your own worms. So many more experiments can be carried out, and in parallel too.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not an exact model yet, but it&amp;#x27;s getting closer. The end goal is to get the model to the point where if you run an experiment on the virtual worm, you can be certain you&amp;#x27;ll get the same results on the real worm.</text></comment>