Thought this might give the FT'rs of this forum a concise explanation as to why some of us (see sticky on the top of this forum for the multi-page explanation) are using our computers for a good cause. Way way into that thread is the following info. Now it's up front, easy for all to see. Sure hope we can get you to use your computers to help out our world. We're the FT team, # 39124. http://folding.stanford.edu/

This is extremely well done, and if you don't want to use your pc or laptop to help now... well.... I'll just reserve comment. We're team 39124; Flyertalkers

http://www.hel-razor.com/FoldingForOurFuture.html

Most of your computer’s computing power goes unused. For example, surfing the net, writing essays, and listening to mp3’s uses between 5 – 30% of your computer’s resources. The rest simply goes wasted. By simply downloading the Folding@home program and letting it run, you can help save lives. The program doesn’t affect your computer’s performance at all. It unobtrusively uses your computers wasted power to study protein misfolding.

The Folding@home project is dedicated to help study the causes of Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease. By doing this, the project hopes that its contribution to understanding the underlying causes of these horrible diseases will help in the search to find a cure or vaccine. In fact, they are already helping. Folding@home is the only distributed computing project that has produced significant results and published them in a major scientific journal such as Nature.

Running the program doesn’t cost you anything. It turns off when you turn off your computer and it only uses the CPU cycles that you are not using. So, when you run a game that needs 100% of your computer’s resources, you’ll have 100% of your computer’s resources.

Folding@home is a non-profit project put out by researchers at Stanford University. All information produced by the project is made available to others free of charge.

Go to: folding.stanford.edu to dowload the client or for more information.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The goal of Folding@home is to study protein misfolding. Proteins need to fold properly before they can accomplish their intended function. Unfortunately, protein misfolding is the underlying cause of diseases like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's. Very little is known about how proteins fold. The study of protein folding is among the most challenging yet most important fields in biology. Understanding how proteins fold can help researchers create vaccines and cures for some of the most horrible diseases afflicting people today.

The study of protein misfolding is extremely computer intensive. It takes some of the most powerful computers to solve some of the simplest questions about protein misfolding. Building ever more powerful computers can be prohibitively costly, many times running into hundreds of millions of dollars. It would take the fastest PC 30 years to simulate the folding of one protein. Luckily, Folding@home has come up with a novel solution to this problem. By breaking the problem in to thousands of tiny pieces and sending them to the approximately 100,000 volunteer computers around the world, the project can solve the same problem in a couple months. The volunteer computers analyze the tiny problems (called Work Units or WUs) simultaneously, sending them back over the internet to the Folding@home scientists.

If you would like to help, go to http://folding.stanford.edu Download the small client and let it run. The only time you’ll realize it’s on your computer is when the screensaver pops up. Then, you’ll see the protein that your computer is folding.