How your Mac can help find a cure for Coronavirus (maybe)
Photo by Ani Kolleshi on Unsplash
World Health Organization (WHO) officials warn the death rate from coronavirus is higher than previously thought, resulting in fatalities in about 3.4 percent of reported cases – this is far beyond the casualties of seasonal flu, and far more infectious.
Everyone is concerned, big events are being cancelled and people are changing habits. Most people feel vulnerable, and want to do something to help – but other than washing your hands there doesn’t seem to be much we can do – but your Mac can do this:
How your Mac can help find a cure for Coronavirus (maybe)
Back in the day the SETI@Home project used software distributed across thousands of Macs and PCs to analyze data gathered from radio telescopes to find extra-terrestrial life.
It was fun, but I don’t believe conclusive evidence of ET has yet been identified (though there’s still analysis of all that data taking place).
Back on Earth, a new Stanford University project called Folding@Home is doing something similar, turning spare cycles on Macs and PCs worldwide into a distributed supercomputer to find cures for diseases, and Coronavirus is one of them.
This means that you can at least contribute something to the cause, though there’s no guarantees we’ll see any success in this, but it’s a start.
“Folding@home is a project focused on disease research. The problems we’re solving require so many computer calculations – and we need your help to find the cures,” the project explains.
The program is working on crunching data in hope of finding cures for diseases, including four forms of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and a huge range of infectious diseases, including Coronoavirus.
The project is joining researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies.
“By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies.
“The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs,” they explain.
To run the Folding@Home Mac app, V7, you’ll any 64-bit Mac (Core 2 Duo or later) running macOS 10.6 or later. You can get the app here.
I want to thank 9to5Mac for alerting me to this.
Have you come across other ways we can contribute to battling this virus? Let us know.
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