[wastedyears]

So what is it, you register with them, and you allow them to use part of your hard drive to store information, or what?

I’m extremely confused

[texas booster]

Check out post 5 for more details.

You download a small program that acts like a screensaver. Instead of pretty fishies swimming around, you are literally folding proteins and uploading the results back to Stanford University.

Folding a single protein is a mammoth task. A single protein composed of 40,000 atoms can take years to simulate a millisecond of folding on a supercomputer. Stanford breaks the task down into tiny snippets and sends the work out to about 260,000 systems around the world.

It is very similar to the SETI project that searched the heavens for alien radio signals, and is a follow-on project to the Genome@home project from the 90’s.

[texas booster]

Scientists can also see the terrible effects of Alzheimer's disease when they look at brain tissue under the microscope: Alzheimer tissue has many fewer nerve cells and synapses than a healthy brain.

Plaques, abnormal clusters of protein fragments, build up between nerve cells.

Dead and dying nerve cells contain tangles, which are made up of twisted strands of another protein.

Scientists are not absolutely sure what causes cell death and tissue loss in the Alzheimer brain, but plaques and tangles are prime suspects.

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It is the creation of the plaques and the formation of misfolded proteins that Folding@home is currently focused on.