For those of you who have computers at home, at work, or at school and leave them on the majority of the time, check this out.
Quote:
Do you want to enlist your computer to help find a treatment for anthrax? Oxford University professor Graham Richards, in conjunction with Microsoft, Intel, United Devices Inc., and the National Foundation for Cancer Research, is leading a campaign to harness personal computer users' idle processing power to help fight the disease. Participants in the program run a screensaver which connects to a central location, downloads an assignment, and performs computations with the retrieved data. Once the data has been analyzed, the information is sent back to the central location and another assignment is retrieved.
The anthrax toxin is composed of three proteins. These proteins are not toxic on their own, but once they bind together they become toxic. Scientists hope that by using the processing power of many PCs they will be able to scan 3.5 billion molecules to determine if any of them can prevent the proteins from binding and inhibit the toxin from reproducing. Once complete, the results will be given to the U.S. and British governments to aid in the development of "late-stage anthrax drugs."
The technology, know as "distributed computing" and the "Metaprocessor Platform" by United Devices, has been used in the past to search for extraterrestrial life. A similar program established by Richards last year is using 1.3 million PCs to aid in leukemia research.
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Basically this works like the SETI program if any of you all use that. You download a client that runs in the background on your computer. This client gets a molecule for your computer to scan and sends it back to the scientists. There are also these types of clients for Cancer and Alzheimers. You can read more about this at these websites:
http://www.intel.com/cure/
http://www.ud.com
You can download the client immediately here:
http://www.intel.com/cure/download.htm
Moderators please move this if you feel it belongs in a different thread.
Part of the solution... Anthrax or Cancer?
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