In case you haven’t heard about it, here’s folding@Home

In a nutshell, it’s a distributed computing project designed to simulate problems associated with protein folding.

Protein folding is basically the stage wherein proteins assemble themselves, before carrying out important functions.Now when a misfold happens, serious consequences may occur – Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Certain individuals hope to better understand these problems through the help of virtual simulation.