Stanford group wants to use your computer to help researchers study the coronavirus

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Stanford University's Folding@home distributed computing promptitude is seeking volunteers to help researchers develop treatment therapies for the novel coronavirus.

Folding@home (FAH) uses the processing concurrency of networked computers to simulate the compounded process of protein folding, which helps determine how to treat diseases like Alzheimer's as able-bodied as cancer, as able-bodied as SARS, culling coronavirus. A clipped explainer from Folding@home:

For both coronaviruses [the customary 2019 nCoV as able-bodied as SARS], the first step of infection occurs in the lungs, back a protein on the unconcealed of the virus binds to a receptor protein on a lung cell. This viral protein is self-named the spike protein ... Proteins are not stagnant--they jerk as able-bodied as fold as able-bodied as unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles as able-bodied as folds into culling shapes

Studying how the protein folds could eventually help scholars develop drugs that could treat infections of the virus.

This motherly of review requires voluminous computational power, which FAH generates by tapping into volunteers' CPUs back they're idle. The promptitude famously acclimated to use idle Sony PlayStation 3s, whose unique "Core" processors offered bulkiest sanguineness at the time than equipotential computers for the specific tasks FAH was doing. But Sony removed the functionality from PS3s in 2012.

To participate in the coronavirus project, download the FAH software, as able-bodied as your computer's unused assets will go to the Folding@home Consortium, "where a review team at Canonizing Sloan Kettering is working to beforehand our understanding of the structures of suspended pharmaceutical targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the erecting of new therapies," co-ordinate to FAH's blog post.

There hypothesize been more than 89,000 confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, the immolation caused by the coronavirus. Increasingly than 3,000 bodies hypothesize died from the disease, including six bodies in Washington State. Open-and-shut by a cough, fever, as able-bodied as shortness of breath, the immolation is typically mild, commiserable the elderly as able-bodied as those with underlying medical knoll most acutely.