Thursday, April 19, 2007

How About This?

St. Jude's Childrens Research Hospital is in Memphis, Tennesee. They treat children with pediatric cancers and catastrophic diseases and it's, "where no one pays for treatment beyond what is covered by insurance, and those without insurance are never asked to pay." Funds donated help kids get treatment and also helps support research that will aid kids all over.

Sounds like a great institution to send Evolved Homeschooler Stuff profits to.

And again, another way of helping fight disease is to Fold@Home

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.


Basically you run a little program that's always on and uses a fraction of your CPU's resources. The only thing you need is an internet connection so the program can send results and get new projects. If anyone is interested or needs help just let me know.

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