Brewology

Sony wrote:You can now download and use the Folding@home™ program. Folding@home™ is a distributed computing project that is run by Stanford University. The goal of the project is to research protein folding mechanisms in the hope that this will lead to medical treatments for related diseases. Using the Folding@home™ program, you can participate in this project over the Internet. Note that the program must first be downloaded and installed on your PS3™

Folding@Home wrote: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.