Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to The Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a few things we've read about in the nature briefing.

We've got one quick story today, and we're back in the world of video games.

Now, specifically, a historically important entry to the medium, and that is

Doom, released in 1993 by ID Software. It's a first-person shooter that will be familiar to many

of you listening right now. Perhaps like me, even if you've not played it in many years,

the cheat code IDKFA is seared into your brain.

But this isn't a trip down memory lane today. Doom has become something of a workhorse of science.

And writing about this is Nature's Rachel Fieldhouse, who joins me down the line from Australia.

Rachel, thank you so much

for being here today. Thanks for having me. And I say there it's a workhorse. It's been used as a tool

across many scientific disciplines, right? Absolutely. Everything from computer science and AI all the way to

biology. And there's a particular subculture that I have been fascinated about for years, which I think perhaps is the main thrust of your article. And this is this can it play doom, almost meme, I guess. Now, basically if something has a screen, people will try and get it to run doom.

Essentially, yeah. We've seen everything from calculators and smart fridges to even computerized pregnancy tests and the little digital bars on the top of MacBook keyboards.

It's glorious, right? I mean, you and I have been showing them. I think electric toothbrush is one of my favorites.

Getting Doom to play inside of Doom is a recursive nightmare. We haven't got time to talk about. But there are hundreds of them, and listeners can go and find

them on the internet, and many of them are glaringly silly. But there's a new one that's been

added to the list that you've really been taking a look at. Yes, so a team in Australia have

decided to essentially get their biological computer to run Doom. So their computer is basically a collection of about 200,000 neurons on top of a silicon

chip.

And so what they've done is they worked with this independent researcher from Singapore, who

wrote the code, and it was part of a hackathon that they ran.

And the whole point of the challenge was, can people get Doom to run on their biological computer?

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