Here are two subjects I came across at the same time yesterday. Both involve folding, but each is very different.
The first is a little bit of levity. Phillip West is an origami enthusiast whom has folded some of the most incredible designs I’ve ever seen, including a fair number of Dragons and other geeky creations.
The other curious Folding related subject involves a Stanford University project whereby folks with Computers and PS3’s can help support cancer research by doing nothing more than simply donating their excess processing power when they aren’t using their devices.
Folding@Home is a joint effort between Stanford and nine laboratories around the world to try to advance their research into learning how Proteins Fold. The website has a better explanation on this, but basically proteins “fold” in a certain way depending upon what function they are meant to serve in the human body. If they fold the wrong way, it leads to cancer and many other types of illness and disorders. We don’t fully understand this behavior in proteins, so there’s a huge effort to research it in the hopes that as we learn more about why proteins behave this way, it could help pave a path to correcting various cancers and illnesses before they even start.
There are a lot of simulations and computer calculations needed to map out these behaviors, and that’s a heavy task for a lot of labs with limited resources. Folks however can help out by downloading some software which runs in the background of our computers when the system is idle, so that when we aren’t using our computers, our processors are still doing something good. PS3’s can also do the same thing, and the software comes loaded with the latest system software (although the info on the site is out of date. The Fold@Home feature is now subsumed under the Life with Playstation option).
So if you feel like helping a good cause, then please consider partaking in Folding@Home
