Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding.
The Folding@home project helps us learn about proteins folding. After we know how they fold, we'll be able to find out a way to prevent such diseases.
How can you help? Just install the Folding@home software. What it does is creates a giant supercomputer out of all the computers running the software. When your computer is idle, the software will process information that is collected and put together into databases and such. As I am typing, my computer is about 80-95% idle. So while I am writing this, my computer is still processing for the project.
The software doesn't affect your computer's performance because it is set to run at a low priority. Running at a low priority means everything else on your computer will be executed before the software, giving everything else priority over it.
If you'd like to help, just download the software from here. I downloaded the "No-nonsense" text-only console, so that way it doesn't even show an icon on the taskbar. However to configure it you need to run commands in DOS. If you don't know DOS, you can just download the graphical client.
Please enter the team number 40848. This will just put you in the list of people that I have told to use it (or others in the team). It is just a cool way we can see how we are all helping out. You can check the stats here.
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