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Hi ....i know this has been mentioned before but i just want to remind any new users and old users at AO that dont know about it ....
What does Folding@Home do?Quote:
Our goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases
How can you help?
What have we done so far?
question answered here : http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
Please support the AO team : team number 11416
can u explain a bit more about that folding@home
whats its purpose...?
The link MemorY provided gives you an overview of Folding@Home, but I will try to explain it as I have told it to a few of my friends... They might have changed their goal a little, but my explanation should still hold up well enough.
Folding@Home is a program that folds protiens on your computer. Protiens are long chains of amino acids that must fold into a special shape for the protien to function correctly. The shape that the protien folds into is controlled by the attraction and repulsion of the different amino acids in the chain. In real life it happens really fast and happens a lot, but scientists want to find out how many different protiens fold under many different conditions. They don't have enough time or money to try every protien in every situation, so they made a program that a computer can run to simulate the folding of a protien. It is pretty accurate, but the scientists will still perform some of the interesting results in a real labratory setting. Folding@Home saves them time and money by giving them results that if they find are interesting they can try it in a real lab. Also, anything they find is free and that means that people as a whole can see benifits sooner and for less cost than a privately researched and funded company.
In order to promote people to run Folding@home, they allow users to organize teams, and these teams can compete to be in the top 100. AntiOnline has a team that was founded quite some time ago (before Jupitermedia) and our team is currently #168. Competition is not easy because there are many teams with a lot more power than us. Take the top 3 teams for instance. These teams are made up of people who are willing to spend lots of $$$ on their computers and dedicate them to folding. They also take a lot of risk because some users Overclock their computers to squeeze extra power out of them. Look at the seperation in scores of those top 3 from the rest in the top 10. HUGE difference. We still have a lot of work infront of us to catch up, but you need to remember that the other teams are also working against us. If they have more users and more power than us they will get a bigger lead. Simply put, we need all of the help we can get. Hence my sig.
Hope that explained a thing or two. Anyways, is anyone else interested in helping?
-Tim_axe