#CrushALZ team competition begins NOW!

by Egle (seplute)

We are very excited to bring you - the first Stall Catchers team competition!

The competition begins NOW & will run for one month - until 9PM ET, May 6 / 1AM UTC, May 7.

During the competition you will contribute points to the team you belong to (be sure to join one! See this blog post for detailed instructions how).
The most active teams will be featured daily on our social media channels & those of our partners + on the EyesOnALZ blog!

Most importantly, at the end of the month we hope to have answered a novel research question that will push the ground-breaking Alzheimer's research program at Cornell University one step closer to crushing Alzheimer's!

How to participate

1. If you haven't played Stall Catchers before, register here and go through a short tutorial.
2. To participate, you will need a team! Look through existing teams on Stall Catchers & join the one you like.
3. Can't find one on the list? Create it! Will it be a team for your family? Organization? Classroom? Retirement community? Go for it! The complete instructions on how to join, create & manage teams can be found here.

The research
The main research aim of the team competition is to help researchers at Cornell University resolve a crucial question about the locations of stalled capillaries in the brain of mice with Alzheimer’s disease. These mice develop the amyloid plaques that are the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease in humans. With state-of-the-art techniques, also used to produce the movie data for Stall Catchers, the researchers can visualize the locations of these plaques in the brain. What we need find out is whether stalled capillaries tend to be closer to amyloid plaques than flowing capillaries. Researchers have imaged a group of mice on several different days and have extracted the location of all the amyloid plaques and the location of each capillary segment in these images. We now need Stall Catchers users to help us figure out which capillaries are stalled in this dataset. We will then look across all these data to see if stalled capillaries tend to be closer to plaques or not. ####Good luck everyone, and don't forget to share your progress on our [forum](http://forum.eyesonalz.com/c/stall-catchers) & social media channels with #CrushALZ!