If any of you remember the old SETI at Home (Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) where you download a program, they send your computer some data to process and then you send them the processed data vai the program. SETI would send you massive amounts of data picked up from the skies and would have your computer analyze it and decide if it was life or not. If your computer was the one that found it, you'd be credited.
Well, Folding At Home is the same thing but more useful. You see, if we discover intelligent life, it's still going to be billions of light years away. Instead, Folding At Home is helping to fix problems that we have here on this planet. Like Cancer. The human genome is composed of proteins, billions of them from what I gather. And there's something that your computer can do to a representation of these proteins is something called Folding. I don't know exactly what that means, but it boils down to this: Stanford University made a program to make use of the millions of spare processing cycles on your computer. Instead, when you're not surfing the web or playing WoW, your computer could be helping to fold these proteins and map out parts of the human genome... or something like that.
I've joined onto the totse.com team
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...&teamnum=49185
My user name is zoklet.net
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...e=zoklet%2Enet
Folding At Home
