There's a project going on at Stanford University that uses personal computers around the world to do protein research. People download their program and run it as a screensaver and it somehow analyzes the code of proteins over the net. This, they hope, can lead to new discoveries in genes and diseases and they're able to do it much faster with a large base of personal computers.

To start running the program, go to http://folding.stanford.edu, sign up and download the program. It works on all post 3.1 versions of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

I signed up a week or so ago and it's a simple, unintrusive program. I thought that it would be a good way for us as a group, to help the scientific community, so I've taken the liberty, through their teams function, to set up an AWADtalk team. To sign up with our team, go to the Preferences panel in the program and put the ID number 3438.