Introduction to Folding@Home and Team Firefox
Introduction to Folding@Home
Folding@Home helps, simply said, researches to get more understanding of complex biological processes. This knowledge can be used to develop medicines that can cure diseases like Alzheimer's.
Team Firefox
Team Firefox — founded in September 2004 — is a Folding@Home team consisting of Firefox users and supporters. Everyone is allowed to join and help spread Firefox, while helping researchers to get better understanding about diseases (and maybe even find cures to them).
Why Folding@Home
Why Folding@Home instead of other distributed computing projects? Because Folding@Home has produced more results than other projects. It can at the end help save lives, by finding cures to diseases. It might actually save your life later, in contrast to other distributed computing projects that check if there are aliens, crack mathematical algorithms or forecast what the climate will be when you've passed away long ago (maybe because of some disease which Folding@Home could provide cures to!). One of Team Firefox's stated goals is to become one of the top 100 Folding@Home teams; a goal we have accomplished, but cannot preserve without your help!.
How to become a part of Team Firefox
Joining Team Firefox is really easy. In just a few steps you can become part of our effort, using nearly every operating system. If you want to know some more about Folding@Home, read on - and if you're convinced already, join the team!
About Folding@Home
More information
Folding@Home is Standford University's distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. It uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. It allows simulating folding for the first time and examine folding related disease.
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, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease.