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Interestingly much of this kind of study has been developed in the field of addiction. In the addict brain there seems to be a defect in the ability to use free will to make a healthy choice to not drink or use drugs. George Koob has been studying this for decades https://www.scripps.edu/resear... It seems there are many structural and chemical abnormalities in the addict brain that impact free will.

Physicists sometimes have it easy. This kind of thing is akin that old joke about treating a cow like a sphere.
Look with the chemical origin of life, that it was governed by physics is not in debate.
What matters are the details, what came first; RNA world, life on a metallic surface, or some thing else?
I have this to toss at so-called astrobiologists who claim that life is spontaneous and easy.
If it is so easy why is there only one kind of life -- 20 amino acids, 4 DNA/RNA bases? To a bio organic chemist the "selection" of this chemical code is arbitrary. Why do we not live in an ecosystem with a shadow "alternative" biosphere? After all life existed for 3 billion years on this planet before even becoming multi-cellular. Plenty of time for chemical weirdos to develop a four base genetic code templating for D chirality beta amino acid chains with side chains made of silicon.
Step off physicists, this field belongs to chemists.

I don't know what your test was, but I used to write about medical tests. I still do occasionally.

One of the problems is that a new medical test doesn't usually give you a clear answer. You want a test that says, "You have rheumatoid arthritis" or "You don't have rheumatoid arthritis." Instead, what you get is tests that say, "You have an 80% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis" or "you have a 20% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis."

If a new test isn't widely adopted by doctors, it's usually because it's not a very accurate test. What do you do if a test says, "You have a 5% chance of leukemia"? Or what do you do if a test says,"You have a positive result for a protein that is sometimes associated with leukemia?"

What did the Scripps web site tell you? This is the kind of test they're concerned with http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20120521/mowen.html It has nothing to do with anything of medical significance to you today.

If it's a test that she doesn't normally do, the most reasonable explanation is that it's a test that doesn't have much significance and won't affect your treatment.

Yes, Raltegravir. Not a neutral source? Fine, here's another one: Zanamivir.

About MD being easy, I beg to differ. The only thing that's easy about it is to do crap. Computers are garbage in, garbage out. It is possible to do things right, only it's much, much more difficult. In fact, so few people know how to do things right that the crap easily passes peer review. It's not so much that the reviewers let the crap pass on purpose in a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" fashion, it's that a lot of the reviewers simply don't know any better. To put it differently, there are far too few reviewers who know what they're doing to reliably block crap from getting published. And this is exacerbated by the attitude of those who do crap. Got a bad review? Reviewer had a bad day and is being unreasonable - submit same stuff to different journal. There are enough journals, and the chance to get a knowledgeable reviewer who can recognize the flaws 2 or 3 times in a row gets almost vanishingly small.

The problem is not so much the computational resources or accuracy of the models. Although these have improved dramatically, even 10 years ago, highly significant results could be gotten out of them, assuming very careful setup, analysis and interpretation. That is what a lot (but not all!) of computational studies are lacking.

To end on a more positive note, post-publication, the really good stuff does get recognized by the community and often gets highly cited. As you alluded, evaluating scientists in the field by number of citations instead of number of publications and impact factor would go a long way in rectifying this crooked situation.

Re: Gates Foundation and malaria.

Also worthy of note is the GO Fight Against Malaria Project at World Community Grid and the research done at Scripps in La Jolla. From the Wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Community_Grid#GO_Fight_Against_Malaria_Project

a relevant portion
"In the latest status report, published on November 2012 and available here, the scientists reported that several compounds had been found to inhibit the virus activity. 20 compounds were ordered, 19 actually arrived, of which 3 were not soluble. From the remaining 16, 7 inhibited Mtb InhA(Mycobacterium tuberculosis). The best hit displayed an IC50 value of approximately 40 micro-Molar. The discovery of this compound is important because of the drug resistant superbugs of Mycobacterium tuberculosis."

The "here" link is
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34265_offset,0#401213

and current status as of 10 July 2013 at
http://gofightagainstmalaria.scripps.edu/index.php/how-we-will-discover-potential-malaria-drugs

Their data is open and available.

The press release is horribly written.

On this we agree...

What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions.

No, we don't. Intact viral particles are the norm.

The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.

While there are lots of EM studies of viral particles, X-ray studies are much more common - 33 full EM models versus 317 diffraction structures. The page I linked in the first response to this article shows just a few of the picornavirus structures that have been determined by X-ray diffraction studies over the past several decades. There are other virus structures out there as well, with an excellent website for anyone interested being Viper.

Somebody makes microchips out of our precious body fluids?

Yep, kinda

It is quite amusing how educational and research institutions try to immediately flaunt their affiliations with the Nobel Laureates. Bruce A. Beutler is a particularly intriguing case. The University of Chicago chalks this up as laureate number 86 as he attended medical school there. The Scripps Research Institute where he was a professor until recently is hailing him as their own. This is despite that as of Septermber 1, 2011, Prof. Beutler is now Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he was a medical resident and a professor from 1986 to 2000 (and began his nobel laureate work).

Nonetheless, congratulations to Dr. Bruce A. Beutler on his award, and all the institutions which fostered his career. Best wishes to him as he joins a growing cadre of formidable researchers in Texas (yes, the same Texas as GH Bush, GW Bush, and presidential candidate Rick Perry).

References
Shaw Prize Autobiography
http://www.shawprize.org/en/shaw.php?tmp=3&twoid=90&threeid=180&fourid=306&fiveid=153

UT Southwestern Press Release
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept353744/files/654940.html
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept353744/files/638281.html

Scripps Research Institute Press Release
http://www.scripps.edu/news/press_releases/nobelprize.html

The University of Chicago front page (right side):
http://www.uchicago.edu/

Summary:
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20100830/adenovirus.html

Paywalled abstract:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5995/1071

The news article uses the headline "fatty foods" but that simply reflects the cultural bias against fat.

And the article also reflects the bias that everything begins in the brain. Check out this researcher's faculty page. He's obviously focused on the brain exclusively.

But seminal research like Good Calories Bad Calories shows us that the reactions are mediated by hormones. Brain effects follow the hormonal influence that makes us eat.

And carbohydrates, not fat, cause insulin release (and chronically elevated insulin levels in people who eat large amounts of carbs, i.e. almost everybody) which causes our cells to suck nutrients and glucose from our blood stream. This makes us hungry, so we eat more. And insulin causes our fat cells to store fat. Our liver converts fructose directly into fat. GCBC also provides a large amount of documented evidence that

Eating fat by itself causes no insulin response, and proteins have a much lower insulin response. Diets like the PaNu approach take advantage of this. The idea that saturated fat (which our bodies are composed of) is somehow bad for is is incredibly wrong. The modern research over the past 50 years that has got us to the deadly dietary guidelines that we still provide to diabetics today (low fat, high carb) is thoroughly researched in GCBC. I'd really recommend that anyone with an interest in this field (or just in losing weight) check out GCBC and PaNu.

I found this looking for more information. A good primer of what they are doing. Joyce Lab News 1

In the case of radiation poisoning, the problem is that so many cells die, that you die. If you can prevent them all dying, you can maybe handle the cancer issues from cells that were damaged such that they've become precancerous, later.

The other thing that's interesting about this, to me, is that there are indications that people who have had heart attacks or hypothermia don't die from those, but from a massive wave of programmed cell death as a result of, essentially, misinterpreting the results of the heart attack/hypothermia: big fluctuations in oxygen levels and ion concentrations, that make the cells all think they're individually damaged and cause them to die en masse. If this could be used to stop that process, it could save millions of lives every year, not just the very few people who have radiation poisoning.

However, we're moving away from such "crude" techniques towards more sophisticated analytical tools, since in many ways biochemistry is now technology-limited. Single-molecule work, such as that pioneered by Carlos Bustamante provide insights that would never be possible with classical methods, and on the other end of the spectrum, we're now working on characterizing the entire network of small metabolite molecules simultaneously and quantitatively. This kind of work just isn't easily carried out by amateur enthusiasts.

That said, there is certainly quite a bit of research that DIY biologists would be capable of performing, especially considering that they could have access to the same kind of resources that professionals do. For example, after amplifying a gene, no researcher will sequence it themselves: it's shipped of to a specialized lab that will do it, for a fee. That sequencing step requires equipment and expertise that's at a higher level than even the pros don't have.

But regardless of theoretical ability, the professionals retain the advantage that it is their job to work on these projects. The time they can dedicate to their work will be far greater than someone who does it as a hobby.

Back to the subject of "openness", the professional scientific world isn't nearly as closed-off as the article would have you believe. It is true that there is a persistent fear of being "scooped", but the standards are changing for staking your claim on a particular piece of research.

It used to be that a full manuscript in a scientific journal was the only thing sufficient to get credit for something. Now, people are gradually embracing online resources are a valid way to communicate, and by extension, to prove that they were the source of any particular bit of publicized material. Even non-finalized material is now more common to make public: Nature has a pre-publication online source for publishing findings, and there are journals devoted entirely to negative results, which was previously unheard-of.

The walls are coming down, it's just a question of finalizing the transition, and winning over the old guard.

Disclosure: I am a professional research scientist, one of the younger ones. I have a substantial hardware/software project in the works, which will likely be simultaneously published via classic journal, online website, and software via SourceForge.

For those of you who forgot your biology, 3 DNA consecutive DNA base pairs (called a codon) are translated into a single amino acid. (Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg won the 1968 Noble prize in medicine for figuring this out and determining the mapping from base pairs to amino acids)

So, after reading the technical article, it says that DNA polymerase can bind to the new base pairs (allowing it to replicate), but it doesn't say what amino acids (if any) these new base pairs code for. That's important information because this alleged breakthrough is useless if it doesn't so something useful where proteins are concerned.

There is a more technical explanation in the link at the end of the article.

Use all that power to fight aids: http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/

BOINC, Tor, Freenet and/or I2P are good examples of things you can put your extra resources to some use. Here are the BOINC projects I would run if I had 100's of system's at my disposal.

Artificial Intelligence System, NanoHive@Home, Predictor@Home, Project TANPAKU, Spinhenge@Home, The Lattice Project, World Community Grid, SIMAP, Malaria Control, Proteins@Home and Rosetta@Home.

At the moment, it is likely that the alternative bases will prevent (or screw up) protein synthesis from genes where they occur. Having a novel base pair that allows transcription of unnatural amino acids does *not* mean that the bases will be recognized by the protein translation machinery.

What would be cool, and is likely being researched currently, is to mate this base pair with other efforts that have produced bacteria that are able to insert unnatural amino acids into proteins a la Peter Schultz's work. Given that the group leader here, Floyd Romesberg (who, incidentally, taught me enzyme kinetics), used to work for Schultz, and is across the street from the Schultz lab, you can bet they are looking for ways to make a truly unnatural base pair/amino acid system that can survive in bacteria. Once you've done this, you will be able to make all kinds of really cool, novel stuff relatively easily. Will be a huge deal once it happens.

-Ted

You're right. The intention here is not to create new proteins, but to tag DNA and possibly create new DNA nanostructures. At the end of the day, mRNAs that are translated to proteins still will only have access to the same set of tRNAs, and therefore, the same 20 amino-acids.

The article can be found here. [PDF download requires a subscription]

A more interesting discovery (in my opinion) -- from the Scripps Institute -- was made about ~10-15 years ago (IIRC) by Pete Schultz's group. They modified tRNAs so that specific codons (DNA/RNA triplets) could incorporate chemically-modified amino-acids into a protein. Some of this has led to interesting work on protein tagging, functional studies as well as the study of molecular evolution. All this is done with in vitro translation, as far as I know.

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC clients, including:-
SETI,
Folding,
Climate Prediction,
Einstein searching for gravitational waves,
LHC helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC,
Rosetta,
Stardust,
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net, rosetta@home, predictor@home). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.

If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.

There are certainly far more than a million internet connected CPUs that are on and idle tonight. Anyone want to guess at the actual number? 10 million? 50 million? 100 million? A few percent of those would more than do all of the jobs that are available on all of the distributed computing projects that are out there.

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
http://predictor.scripps.edu/

It's hard to visualize the interior of cells, because particles are smaller than light waves, it's all in a liquid medium, and everything is crowded. Scripps Institute researcher David Goodsell paints cell interiors in a sort of "two and half dimensional" view, showing the proteins and other macromolecules but leaving out water and small ions. You see a cross section plus a little more, and it is actually very helpful in terms of understanding how things fit together in a cell. The first painting here is E. Coli and shows the center, full of DNA all crowded and twisted onto spools (nucleosomes), surrounded mostly by ribosomes which create proteins. Then there is the cell membrane and in this view, a flagellum (which acts as a propeller).

This helps to understand the magnitude of Venter's project. DNA really does take up the majority of space in a cell like this. It's true that he's using the ribosomes and such that were already there, but replacing the DNA will totally change how the cell works and functions.

It will be interesting to see what happens if they add DNA for a structure like a flagellum which does not exist in the "donor" cell, or for a cell that is shaped very differently than the donor. The new cell should start to grow the appendages or change its shape appropriately. Some pretty freaky experiments will be possible.

Not to mention that that extra dollar cost may push a Mac over the line into capital equipment where overhead isn't charged. My first laptop for work ran into that issue: I picked a nice model for ~$1800, and was told I wasn't spending enough. As it turned out, the $2600 ibm was cheaper, because the lower cost one came with 50% overhead attached.

You could have also ssh'd into a real cluster, or built a Mac cluster for a price similar to an Opteron system, and just quietly integrated it with your desktops (how my lab runs now). They just work, and they just work smoothly. It's also nice that tools like VMD come in native form, and run very smoothly. It's nice taking VMD, GAMESS, and Amber on the road with you, running in native mode the same way they run on the big clusters back home, just in case. (yes, I know about the windows ports or cygwin, but they always feel somewhat clunky)

Finally, sometimes the commercial software really does just work better, and fighting a journal over file formats is an exercise in futility.

You're not thinking this through very well, Tom St. Denis.

The SETI@Home project, which analyses data collected from Arecibo, pioneered Internet-based distributed computing employing the PCs of the general public. Since then, the know-how that went into that project has been used for many other distributed computing efforts.

Some of those efforts, such as the biological and medical research Folding@Home and FightAIDS@Home projects, surely fit your definition of "more vital science". And were it not for Arecibo, those research efforts would not have been possible.

They are pictures and not movies, and kind of 2 1/2 dimensional, but I really like the artwork of Scripps Institute professor David Goodsell. See some examples of the interiors of cells here:

http://www.scripps.edu/mb/goodsell/illustration/ce ll/

These give a much better idea of how crowded it is inside cells. Even though Goodsell only shows the macromolecules and leaves out the water and ions, everything is just packed together.

For example, the picture on that page shows a bit of the cell membrane of a bacterium. A flagellum is curving away - the bacterium spins this for propulsion. The external surface is coated with sugar-protein molecules to make it slimy. Just inside is a meshwork of protein filaments (shown just as a green line of molecules here). Inside the body of the bacterium are lots of ribosomes, shown in purple, emitting whitish squiggles of newly synthesized proteins. And just inside that, taking up much of the body, is the bacterium's DNA, wrapped around its spools to keep it neat, shown in yellow. A bacterium doesn't have a nucleus so the DNA is right out there with everything else. And they're really small so much of the cell is taken up with DNA.

This kind of picture gives a more accurate impression of what it is really like inside cells, but it would not lend itself to 3D visualization because you wouldn't be able to see far enough through the cell. It's just too crowded.

These guys actually blew up the bathroom in a plane with a cut down bomb for testing. After blowing up a movie theater seat.

Yeah, with nitroglycerin. The article from the Register said it was TATP, and proceded to explain his knowledge from researching TATP that it is highly unlikely TATP could be used to bring down a plane. TATP != nitroglycerin. And just looking up one aspect of the article seems to check out so far. The rest would be hard to check out without performing the experiments or talking to someone who has made it.

"As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.

http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.php
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm

So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?"

Grr....I can't let this go.....

I'm a guy who was once associated with one of labs/projects mentioned above. I was working on the problem for years, and have a great deal of expertise in the area.

I can also tell you that the project is complete and utter crap, from a scientific perspective. The PI routinely misrepresents the project goals, claiming "possible" results that could never, ever come from the type of research performed. In general, the "science" is poorly-conceived and improperly controlled, and most of the "experiments" are methodologically flawed. I can't post my name here...it would be career suicide.

As one of the authorities to whom you seem so desperate to appeal, let me assure you: if you are devoting your resources to this project, the world would be a better place if you simply turned your computer off.

As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.

http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.php
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm

So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?

I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you there. The network alone is not to blame. Also, keep in mind that the latency differences between most 10GigE implementations and Myrinet are radically different especially once you get above the hardware and protocol levels. They are getting better, Force10's new 10GigE switches being good examples, but they're not that close when you put something like MPI and then a poorly implemented-algorithm wise-application on top of that. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are other interconnect technologies like Infiniband and Quadrics that may give you better performance.

The real scaling issues (in a lot of cases) are within the application itself. Some applications scale really well. I'll use scientific codes as examples. For instance, we've gotten LAMPSS (a molecular dynamics code) to scale very well across our 1024 node, 2048 processor cluster. It is capable of using the entire system to process jobs; all 2048 processors with an Infiniband interconnect and MVAPICH. However, applications like AMBER, another molecular dynamics code, don't scale at all well beyond 256 processors on our system. It's not a fault of the hardware, the network, or the message passing interface in a lot of cases. It's simply that the algorithm used in the code just doesn't scale well beyond a certain point. The code just isn't optimized well, or it just won't scale, period. There are other code bases that are being used by our researchers that do well in an SMP, shared-memory architecture, but simply won't run at all in a distributed memory, cluster architecture. Some because they require a large memory footprint, others simply because the problem the code needs to solve cannot be decomposed and spread across nodes in a cluster. As far as performance goes, we've actually seen some codes, like the quadrature code (APREC) run by David Bailey of LBL, actually achieve super-linear gains. He ran a series of jobs in his quest to do the largest one-dimensional quadrature calculation (which he achieved and published at SC04) starting with one processor and scaling to 512 nodes (1024 processors). At the 16, 64, and 256 processor range, his code actually got 17.66, 69.79, and 270.17 times speed up over a single processor, respectively. Now this is not typical behavior. Typically, you don't get this kind of speed up (usually you do see significantly lower efficiency; in the range of 15 to 20 percent in a lot of cases), and his code did fall off to 919.22 times speed up for 1024 processors. My point is, the application itself has as much impact on performance as the architecture it is being run on. And, don't forget compiler differences, but this could go on for days.

I would strongly urge the original poster to talk to the vendors that develop the software you use and simply ask them if the reason they don't make a cluster version of the software is due to economic reasons, or simply because the application just won't work in that architecture. Remember, computing is a right-tool-for-the-right-job arena. There's no single platform that will do everything for everybody.

IBM's World Community Grid: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

investigate protein-related diseases: http://predictor.scripps.edu/

Rosetta@home: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Cell Computing http://www.cellcomputing.net/

So I'm not being sarcastic here, my genuine questions is : why should I spend my free computing power on calculating prime numbers instead of research to cure cancer?

Yes, there are gaps and there always will be, unless we're able to account for every single mutation in the evolution of a species. You will be able to flash this argument forever, but these gaps are not proof of anything, they're non-info. This finding is information, and guess what, it fits with current theories on evolution, as have many other findings before it.

A mechanism has been found in bacteria that causes the rate of mutation to go up when in a hostile environment. This is observable. This causes resistent bacteria to evolve from non-resistant bacteria at a high rate. In fact, these researches found a way to turn of evolution in bacteria! Turning of evolution... sounds like an IDiots wet dream doesn't it? However, if evolution does not occur, what exactly did they turn of? Here's a link for you - At the bottom of that page is a link to the published article.

- thorsten

Honestly I wouldn't use either Office or OpenOffice for these tasks. Nor would I dis your average office worker. I would check out Numeric and SCI Python. More on it Here . And a presentation from EuroPython where the BioSimGrid is manipulating and reporting on 2000 chunks of data that are each 5-20GB in size.

Agreed. Works on the big three platforms (Macs are stuck with a command line app for now, but hey...), you can tune the priority of multiple projects and yes, there is a protein structure project running (but currently not accepting new accounts right now).

Now if only we could tie in P2P, distributed back-ups and money for CPU cycles, why this whole geography-based nation-state thing can be consigned to extinction.

Screed

The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.

That is quite odd of him to say. I just checked on seti@home, climate prediction and predictor@home via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists. Well maybe the distributed computings teams should hire Jef Raskin and his Amazing Basic programming abilities - right?

I think sometimes, you wake up for an interview and haven't had coffee yet and say things that are not quite what you intended - it happens to me all the time ya know...

Perhaps this would be a good place to mention FightAIDS@Home, which is a distributed computing project like SETI@Home. It is used for research into newer drugs to keep up with the mutability of the HIV virus, which has been termed computational co-evolution. It only runs on Windows so far. OS X and Linux versions are supposedly in the works, but they've been taking ages.

How the fuck is this +5 informative? What information did he provide? He's just bitching because he is one of the minority few on this planet who is healthy, give him another 20 years and if his time ran out he'll be speaking a different tune.

Chemical sensitivities and CFS are probably autoimmune related or at the very least due to a weak immune system, which makes it no surprise that a geek would have troubles with such conditions due to his sterile living conditions: http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/041504b.html

Not to mention that the toxic chemicals used to manufactur our toys ARE harming you, but luckily your system isn't sensitive or weak enough to experience much of a distubance. The damage is probably cumulative though, so tick tock.

Such conditions have nothing to do with being an attention whore. Have you ever had so little energy that it felt like a struggle to breathe? Where you had to consciously sit still in a chair, attempting to relax all muscles in order to conserve enough energy to be able to get up to cook your next meal... only to have to sit back down, eyes closed, trying to keep hope? What the fuck are you supposed to do in such a situation? There are no magic pills to make you have energy, eating a ton of sugar doesn't help because the problem is deep. You can't get up and scream in frustration, you are trapped. Now tell me, what kind of attention does one receive from this when they are living alone and no one sees it, and they hate doctors so they don't go?

Keep your moronic comments to yourself. I hope you never get sick, but unfortunately, it is a fact of life and you will.

Here's some information on the vaccines mentioned in the article. There's one from Xenova and another developed by Scripps . Both work by creating antibodies to Cocaine. The Xenova vaccine has had a phase II trial. I wonder if the specificity of the antibodies is really a settled question. If not, then you might find that pleasure, pain, and sex or something more subtle wouldn't be quite the same thing again. Not something I'd want to mess with. It seems silly, if not scary to be considering giving it to children at this point. Here are the folks at the UK Brain, Science, Addiction, and Drugs although they don't have much up.

Currently available projects are...

SETI@home
Predictor-Protein structure prediction

Coming soon....

climateprediction.net
Folding@home

Farther in the future (i.e. pending funding)...
Einstein@home -- a search for gravitational waves.

In the conceptual stage, since sometime last week...
neuralnet.net -- studies of the nature of intelligence using neural nets and genetic algorithms

Fight AIDS at home is just such a project.

While I agree that there are factors that prevent this from being used by everyone constantly, large-scale projects can often have a marketing twist put on them, or offer incentives. Additionally, an especially cool geek project would certainly pull a few volunteers. The important part is getting the awareness of the project to the proper audience, as the internet expands, I cant imagine a worthy cause not being able to find volunteers.

BOINC doesn't run multiple projects at the same time. It runs one project at a time, but it divides its time between projects according to percentages that you choose.

There are no active, public projects besides SETI@home yet. Predictor@home is running a public alpha test of its client that anyone can participate in. climateprediction.net began a private alpha test of its client today, and plans to begin a public beta test next month. Folding@home is developing a client, but has not announced any alpha or beta testing for it yet. BOINC Beta Test is still beta testing the BOINC client and may create an Astropulse project based on the client. Einstein@Home may be developing a client based on BOINC for its project which begins in 2005.

SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."

These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.

Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)

"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.

If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.

The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.

So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.

More importantly there are more useful distributed computing projects. Here is a pretty good index. For example there's Folding@Home which furthers our onderstanding of proteins, which are so important in so many life processes and diseases, and fightAIDS@home which has already found a promising new drug. Or how about SETI@home? Trying to crack encryption by brute force seems like such a waste in comparison to these.

Perhaps the encryption contests are so popular just because you can win money. It's like a lottery. Maybe the only thing that could be done would be to have a cash prize for significant findings in other projects, or if who did it can't be defined due to the nature of the algorithm, maybe even just an ordinary lottery?

I feel the same way, that's why I run FightAIDS@Home on my computers. The research institute is non-profit, and there findings are for the common good. Check it out.

I ran across an article regarding another project using the Seti@Home model. Fight AIDS at Home is using it to screen drug compounds.

Once upon a time, high-end boxes came pre-modded. But, then the cold war ended and high-end box manufacturers could no longer afford extravagances like that. Of those machines of the last generation of blinken-lights, the Convex Exemplar SPP-1000 was the most kickass looking computer system ever designed.

Check it out
(As you can see, they were so kick-ass they not only walked on water, they hovered above it!)

Those yellow-green light-bars that go up the front, over the top and down the back are actually fully programmable individual one-inch lights. These boxes came with code to do all kinds of fancy effects with the blinken-lights, such as a ping-pong effect, or racing dots that went at different speeds depending on the load of the machine.

Although the pictures only show the base metallic-purple skins, you could order them with one of 20 different color schemes. The Scripps Research Institute got theirs in a very bright red, as you can see.

Ultimately, Convex got bought by HP and all future designs from that group were exceedingly dull-looking, until finally, just last week, HP laid off a boat-load of the Convex engineers because HP doesn't need technical expertise anymore - they are Microsoft's largest partner!

Actually, that is often not true at all. Speaking as a grad student with experience in structural biology, the majority of programs actually used for NMR structures, X-ray structures, , molecular graphics, etc etc (the list it very long!) are all developed by university labs and given away free, generally open-sourced as well. Universities don't generally hold such things hostage, as there is the understanding that science is based on sharing, nor hoarding.

-Ted

The SI prefixes (from NIST) are:

yocto (10e-24)
zepto (10e-21)
atto (10e-18)
femto (10e-15)
pico (10e-12)
nano (10e-09)
micro (10e-06)
milli (10e-03)
[unity] (10e+00)
kilo (10e+03)
mega (10e+06)
giga (10e+09)
tera (10e+12)
peta (10e+15)
exa (10e+18)
zetta (10e+21)
yotta (10e+24)

The length of a typical bond between two atoms is about one Ångstrom -- 10e-10 metre, or a tenth of a nanometer -- so the first few prefixes probably won't come up much in conversation [yet?].

(for completeness, there are binary versions of these prefixes too :-)

And on the subject of nano-things... let's not let the CAD-crazed physicists with their molecular beams and Atomic Force Microscopes push the fascination of supramolecular chemistry off the stage. Have a look at the Stoddart and Rebek groups' pages. Also see KevinMS' comment!

Various scientific apps, such as MSI InsightII and Felix, CSD quest and Macromodel, SGI's gmemusage and sysmon, Remedy, Framemaker, you name it.

Some of the above are low bandwidth, some are very high bandwidth, some use GL through X, some are pure X.

The idea that the way to do network transparency is to have the remote machine be the one tracking the mouse is just crazy. It would be far better for all GUIs to live locally, and for the on-the-wire activity to happen with some more domain-specific RPC, or other services.

I completely agree. But as you state elsewhere, we are stuck with X because it is entrenched. And I'd like to add that for the average user it doesn't suck so badly as to be unbearable. I actually enjoy what I have.

But [SGI's X server is] still ridiculously slow, given what their hardware is capable of! You only have to compare X performance to GL performance to see this.

Well, I have benchmarked one app that comes in both flavors, although you might call both implementations below par. The numbers are not incredibly different. The overhead due to macro interpretation and number crunching involved in this app simply outweighs the raw graphics performance, and that seems also to be the case in many other scientific apps I see day in and out.

I guess my point is that for many apps real life performance is not as markedly affected as you'd guess based on the internal workings of the X protocol. In my pedestrian view that means X is mostly good enough to get work done.