Free Republic

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Utah, /PRNewswire/ -- Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, has confirmed through historical documents the identities of German ancestors in President Barack Obama's family tree.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.

Time for awards to be passed out for the FReepers who have pushed the team past 25 Million points. For the old timers, you never thought we wuld see the day, huh? We had threads when we topped a million points as a team and threads when we blew the doors off the DUmmies team and silenced their boasting (what ever happened to them?). In this thread if you have seen a huge contribution to the team then please recognize the poster and let us know so we can all shout out to them. Cheering and noisemakers to all!

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 460 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 in 54th place (with 1050 active CPUs - 123,500 completed Work Units and 24.75 million points). Please take the time this Memorial Day weekend to run the F@H program and...

Inner Life of a CellInner Life of the Cell: Animation conception and scientific content by Alain Viel and Robert A. Lue. Animation by John Liebler/XVIVO. SIGGRAPH Award Winning Video

Time for a new Free Republic Folding@home thread. Our Free Republic team of 428 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 in 55th place (with 1,025 active CPUs - 106,120 completed Work Units and 20.25 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn...

Several folks have asked to learn more about the Folding@Home project. I will provide information here that talks about the science and the math behind F@H. Above all, remember that F@H is about finding a cure to the diseases that take the live and minds of our loved ones. Basic research is generated concerning the causes of Alzheimers, Parkinsons and BSE, among others. F@H is an outgrowth out the Genone@Home project started back in the 90's. That project ended April 14, 2004 and Folding@Home is its offspring. Folding@Home is a combination of Distributed Computing and Serious Math, sent out all...

From a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society concerning nanotubes: The folding of proteins in confined spaces is a ubiquitous theme in biological and biomaterial applications, including folding in chaperones and pores, nanotube-based drug delivery, and cotranslational folding of nascent peptides in the ribosomal exit tunnel. The role of confinement on peptide conformational equilibrium has thus gained much interest in recent years, and a natural first hypothesis to investigate is the role of confinement alone in protein conformational preferences. ... Still, there exists a growing body of evidence to suggest that molecular water plays a role in...

Merry Christmas to all of the folders among the ranks of Free Republic! We have reached #57 on the list of teams worldwide, 3 FReepers are in the Top 1,000 of all folders and we are stomping the bejebers out of the DUmmies and Daily Kos. A year ago we were just beginning to expand. Now we have about 170 regular contributors with nearly 1,050 computers using F@H as their screensaver. Folding@Home makes a real difference in basic research into such diseases as Alheimer's, Parkinson's and BSE. All it takes is a little free time to download the core, which...

"Think you don't make a difference?" Those are the words that our very own FReeper/trucker papasmurf started out on a thread for one of his friends, almost a year ago. The subject of the thread, a young man named Dylan and his mother Smile, had successfully battled cancer. Papasmurf emailed me to let us know that Dylan is having some new problems, and has gone to the hospital several times while doctors work to discover the source of his problems. Here is Dylan during his fight with cancer and again after being diagnosed healthy:

Today ATI's graphics processors help accelerate complex computations in stream computing applications used in scientific research. ATI is supporting bio-medical research to help scientists understand disease at the genetic level. With a strong understanding of how diseases form, it will become possible to develop diagnostic methods, and preventative treatment and medicine for many acute diseases in humans. Stanford University is using ATI’s GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) to run Folding@Home, a distributed computing project designed by its chemistry department. This application performs computationally intensive simulations of protein folding, using the stream computing capabilities of ATI’s Radeon® 1900 and 1950 Series processors,...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI and BOINC members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 512 processors and 220 user names. We have a number of new users in the team, with over a dozen folders now from GetLoaded.com all popping onto the hit list this week. We now have ten members who have contributed at least 10,000 points each. Klutz Dohanger, Malsua, Ken in Texas, Andrewksu, LSimpson, kingu, Uriah, arderenne and rach_FR...

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162

Any Freepers "folding@home"???? For those not familiar with F@H -> some diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer and even "mad cow" disease are believed to be linked to protein (mis)folding. A scientist team from Stanford University studies this phenomenon to try and find a cure to these diseases. To do this, they have designed a software (folding@home) which enables people to donate unused power from their computer to speed up medical research!