Your computer can help the fight against the coronavirus.
Thanks to a collaboration between the Folding@home Consortium and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, you can donate your unused computational resources so researchers can use them to better understand the coronavirus. All you need to do is download this free client, which connects your PC to a distributed network of computers.
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The additional computation power will make it faster to process models that could lead to a cure for the virus, also known as COVID-19.
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“Proteins are not stagnant — they wiggle and fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes,” a press release explains. “We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles and folds into alternative shapes in order to best understand how it interacts with the [lungs], so that an antibody can be designed.”
“With many computers working towards the same goal, we aim to develop a therapeutic remedy as quickly as possible,” a statement further reads. “By downloading Folding@home, you can help provide us with the computational power required to tackle this problem.”
Those interested can download the software from here.
That’s not the only technological initiative the coronavirus has inspired.
Researchers from Alibaba developed an artificial intelligence system that diagnoses the virus in a matter of seconds, with 96% accuracy. The Chinese government too developed an app to detect COVID-19 infections, but recent reports suggest the app is sharing users’ data with police.
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