What is Folding @ Home? Folding@home is a distributed client computing effort by Stanford University intended to help understand how proteins assemble or "fold." Exactly how proteins assemble themselves is a mystery, and why proteins sometimes fold improperly or "misfold" is also not fully understood. Many serious diseases are related to the misfolding of proteins, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Mad Cow Disease, and several forms of cancer. By donating your CPU's spare cycles, you are contributing to an effort to understand how proteins fold, which is the first step to understanding how basic proteins work and how we might treat these diseases. When you are not using your computer, the processor will run simulations of different proteins and the way they assemble to better help scientists understand why they do what they do.  read more »

Computers can be very intimidating for the uninitiated, so I'm writing this article in an attempt to demystify them. I'm going to focus on the hardware level, this should help the next time you have a computer problem, and the technician spews forth a bunch of techno babble.

Computers are essentially large, expensive legos. They are assembled in a modular fashion from components that have specific functions. These parts are pretty durable, and easy to assemble, but as with most things, the devil is in the details.  read more »