eggchen

Well I came across this picture on the internet today and it really got me wondered, how the hell did Google come up with all those ga-jillo-bytes of webspace??

For people that leaves their computer on overnight, or over days, or over weeks, or even longer just to download your favorite music, tv shows or movies. Admit it, everyone of you are guilty. But when you leave your computer idle, sitting there just sucking juice from your electric company, why not put it to some good use? Such as folding proteins.

Here is a jist of it.

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

This little piece of software is free and it doesn’t hog your processor power when you are using it. To get it you can head to the following link.

Folding@Home

I strongly encourage anyone that use a computer to run this little piece of software in the background. It does you no harm and at least you are doing something good for the humanity once.