What is Folding?

There's a Folding team on the ABIT board and I've never heard the term before. Is this related to fancy napkin folding or origamis?

IMSA

 

There goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases

What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.
How can you help? You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.

I copyed and pasted this info from this site...http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

Its a good cause and I have been folding for three days now so far it hasent caused me any problems.

 

Completely off the subject but this is the only way I can do this

Have you guys noticed that you cannot make a new thread or if you click on the user the same happens you get the dreaded screen of nothing.

for now you can only post within a thread

is it just me

who do we tell no body around that can fix it

 

You think one of us should email the administrators or does somebody here knows how to let them know

 

OH OH we can't pm or report the post. it goes to the same screen

even the smileys are not working just tried to click on the happy face and same thing hapenned

Edit: just emailed them.