Just thought I’d further a humanitarian project. It’s a distributed computing project that hopes to understand protein folding. It works in the background so it’ll slow down your computer a little bit, but you can always pause the program when you need all the processing power you can get. Also, it’s possible to set it so it only works as a screen saver, after specifiable number of inactive minutes.
edit: I should add that understanding protein folding will help us understand such “Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.” Also, I should add that I know nothing about protein folding.
uh… yeah. In my haste I guess I forgot to explain that. Basically, they’ve taken a great big computer program, or a couple of them, that would take forever and ever to complete on one computer, and then broken it up into littler programs, which they then send out to anybody who downloads the client.
Each program is a little part of a simulation of the process a protein goes through assembles itself.
Well, mad cow is caused by an odd form of protein that for lack of a better word causes the brain’s protein to morph into a bent shape. I assume that this process in complex to the extreme and would require a huge equation to simulate.
One reason that DNA took so long to calculate was its vast complexity.
So, if you decide to follow the link, guys, which I assume none of you have because you’re all evil, post here to make me feel justified in starting this thread in the first place.
