Free Republic

The Coronavirus is causing lots of problems around the world, and it can feel a bit unfair that many of us are home living our lives, unable to help. However, that doesn't mean we can't do anything. Folding@Home announced that it is taking the fight to the Coronavirus, and you can donate your computer's leftover processing resources to help researchers find a cure. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by the Stanford University, aimed at learning about protein folding with the purpose of fighting disease. Distributed computing means that rather than using one big supercomputer, Folding@Home relies on users...

So, just who is this top Iranian general the U.S. just eliminated? For many of us who watch and analyze news out of the Middle East daily, he was the world’s number one bad guy. Qassim Soleimani has been in control of Iran’s Quds Force for more than 20 years. His current greatest hits include helping Bashar al Assad slaughter hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Syrian civil war, stoking the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war, and overseeing the killing of hundreds of Iraqi protesters recently demonstrating against Iranian influence in their country.

Congratulations to all Folding@Home team members for reaching the 1 Billion point Milestone.

It has been a while since our last Free Republic Folding@Home update. The team has seen growth in the past couple of years as contributors have added high performance GPUs from NVidia and AMD/ATI, and same consoles such as the PS3. The team started in 2001 with a few volunteers, and grew dramatically in 2005 as we started actually posting regular threads. As we grew from a Top 2000 team to a Top 100 team, we attracted the attention of DU. After a couple of years of name calling, they realized that merely boasting that you can beat the opposition...

Fort Hood Texas Shootings Free Republic Archives This thread is for everyone, be sure to bookmark it. If you create a new thread, feel free to post a link to it here as well. Our prayers Continue...... *Update:13 Soldiers Killed 31 Wounded Fort Hood Shooting [Muslim terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] *MAJ. GEN. ROBERT SCALES (RET.) "This was a deliberate act of execution." (FOX NEWS) *Barack Obama Gives "Shout-Out" Before He Comments on Shooting -- FOX News (here's the video) *Transcript: President Obama delivers remarks on Ft. Hood shooting (after shoutout) *NBC CHICAGO: Obama's Frightening Insensitivity Following Shooting *Obama...

SUMMARY. The influenza virus infects people and animals by binding to complex sugar molecules on the surface of the respiratory tract. Bird viruses bind most strongly to bird cell-surface sugars and human viruses bind most strongly to human cell-surface sugars. As the recent swine-origin influenza virus has demonstrated, there is considerable overlap between the binding ability of human and pig viruses to cells of the other host. Changes to this binding affinity are one key component for viruses to make a jump between species, and it is difficult to predict the necessary mutations ahead of time. We would like to...

Family History Web Site Confirms German Ancestry Through President's Sixth Great-Grandfather PROVO, Utah, /PRNewswire/ -- Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, has confirmed through historical documents the identities of German ancestors in President Barack Obama's family tree. The discovery was made by an Ancestry.com genealogical research team, which determined that President Obama's 6th maternal great-grandfather Johann Conrad Wolfley was born in Besigheim, Wuerttemberg, Germany, in 1729 (present day Baden-Wuerttemberg). Genealogists at the No.1 family history Web site revealed that President Obama's German ancestor was born Johann Conrad Wolflin on January 29, 1729. He immigrated in 1750, sailing...

Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson; Colossus, Cray, ASCI Red and Blue Gene. The names of boxing's heavyweights are never forgotten - and it's the same with the champs of the supercomputing world. These machines truly are like no others. Each is computationally more muscular than its predecessor; and for a while, each has claimed the title of the fastest computer in the world. But, as the calamitous fall of 'Iron' Mike Tyson showed us, champions are built to be felled. And so we've seem supercomputers come and go, growing from single processor machines capable of a...

Improving blood flow to brain is a preventive strategy CHICAGO --- A slow, chronic starvation of the brain as we age appears to be one of the major triggers of a biochemical process that causes some forms of Alzheimer's disease. A new study from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine has found when the brain doesn't get enough sugar glucose -- as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain -- a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer's. Robert Vassar, lead author,...

... We present a novel computational approach for describing the formation of oligomeric assemblies at experimental concentrations and timescales. We propose an extension to the Markovian state model approach, where one includes low concentration oligomeric states analytically. This allows simulation on long timescales (seconds timescale) and at arbitrarily low concentrations (e.g., the micromolar concentrations found in experiments), while still using an all-atom model for protein and solvent. As a proof of concept, we apply this methodology to the oligomerization of an Abeta peptide fragment (Abeta 21–43). Abeta oligomers are now widely recognized as the primary neurotoxic structures leading to Alzheimer's...

With the 6.20 (classic & GPU) and 6.22 (SMP) clients out, we (Dr. Pande and the F@H team) can start looking forward to the next steps in client development. We still have some last bits of work to completely unify the clients, but the hard part is already completed there for the most part. The 6.2x series introduces several new features for donors, but in time, the clients have been getting gradually more and more complex to use. The Win/SMP and multi-gpu setups are examples of very challenging setups. Our primary plans for the future are to make setup much...

In the near future, we will be releasing some new projects which require a very rapid turn-around time. These are peptide fragment simulations which we are interested in simulating for a time-sensitive collaborative project involving protein structure prediction. These WUs will go directly to the classic clients running with -advmethods. Non-classic clients (eg SMP, GPU, PS3) will not be affected, as all of these calculations will be run via the AMBER core and only the classic client supports the AMBER core. To reward users for participating in this exciting project, we will be giving a x1.5 bonus in the points...

*** New PS3 client *** Sony has released an upgraded client for the PS3. Check out Noam Rimon's (he's the lead developer at Sony) post: Hello, Starting today a new version of Folding is available. This version is a minor fix to the previous 1.3 version and adds a better tuned algorithm that handles peak performance hours of Folding@home network, by acting differently to certain network errors if those occur. It is recommended that you update to the new version by quitting the application and restarting it. Your current WU will not be damaged in any way, in-fact Folding will...

We're often interested in comparing things--predicting a known difference is a good way to test our methods. Then, once we're pretty confident that things work, we want to predict ways to change the way proteins interact. Changing a system in a defined way is both a good tool for biological insight and the basis for a lot of medical treatments. In this particular case, we're interested in the "selectivity" of ligand binding by a protein: the protein is known to bind one small molecule ("ligand") much better than another. So project 3903/3905 is a pair of projects comparing the protein-small...

As we approach one million PLAYSTATION 3 consoles participating in the Folding@Home program, we continue to improve the FAH client. With the new Firmware v2.1 we also prepared an updated version of FAH, which can soon be automatically downloaded by clicking on the FAH icon. This updated version includes the following new features: If you happen to be one of the people that wants to leave their machine running after they finished their late-night gaming session, but wish to shut it down after a limited period of time, we have a great tip for you: Go to Settings menu, select...

A plea to all owners of new computers and PS3s this weekend to strongly consider adding the Folding@home program to your new system to run in the background. Why? Because Alzheimer's Disease, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes are partially or wholly caused by mid-folded proteins. You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer...

The PandeGroup has all been very excited about the great turnout of FAH donors over the last few weeks, allowing FAH to go over a petaflop. The PS3's have been cranking out some very useful scientific results due to the new scientific software present in v1.2. The PS3's are so fast, we've been looking at the results sometimes 2x to 3x a day (instead of a couple times a month). If all goes well, we're hoping to write up these results soon (maybe a few weeks) for peer reviewed publication. It's also interesting to think about what we want to...

Folding@home will announce this week that it has offically joined the ranks of PetaFLOP computing! While teasing with the mark before, this appears to be the real deal. A formal announcement should come this week from Stanford University as the numbers are crosschecking for publication. Why does this matter? Because every computer and PS3 that has joined the fight to research Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease puts us that much closer to a CURE for these brain wasting diseases. Imagine if Ronald Reagan was strong for another 10 years in retirement and had been fully able to participate after his...

Time for an update. The Free Republic Folding team #36120 started about 4 years ago, and became popular in December of 2005. We will hit 30,000,000 points this week and congratulations are in order to all folders. Our FreeRepublic team of 475 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is...

The Brain Tour explains how the brain works and how Alzheimer's affects it. Start Brain Tour Taking the tour: There are 16 interactive slides. As you view each slide, roll your mouse over any colored text to highlight special features of each image. Then, click on the arrow to move to the next slide.