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Prions Observed Jumping Species Barrier
palegray.net writes "Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers. Believed to be responsible for ailments such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and 'mad cow' disease, prions are thought to disrupt biological processes by causing normal proteins to fold abnormally. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have observed infectious prions from hamsters causing abnormal protein development in mice, along with a range of other observations on prion actions in test tube environments. From the article: '... they also found that when a prion jumps species, it produces a new kind of prion. "This is very worrisome," says Claudio Soto, who led the research, published in Cell. "The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
On the flip side, if your energy source is dirty, turning off F@H might be more beneficial in the long run. It's a trade off.
I KNEW IT ALL ALONG!!!
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There is not such a thing as "spare CPU cycles" since when you run a *@home program, CPU power consumption pikes. In a laptop, when running any CPU intensive distributed program, battery level is stuck since all the power goes to the CPU instead of charging the battery.
Or you could just tick the box that says "Pause work while battery power is being used (for laptops)" in the F@H menu. Its not that hard.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)