Breath sensor could offer on-the-spot cancer report

Researchers are using nanoparticles to create a material sensitive enough to analyze a person's breath in real time and detect indicators of cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses.

Scientists at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology said today that even though diagnostic breath-analysis tools have been around for several decades, this is the first time a material has been developed that's sensitive enough to deliver on-the-spot results.

From CNET News

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Foldit Game: Solve Puzzles for Science

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer Puzzle game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.
 
FoldIt is an online game in which humans try to solve one of the hardest computational problems in biology: protein folding. You don't need to know anything about biology to play the game, although a little background will help. Most of the players of foldit are not biologists. 


How does my game playing contribute to curing diseases?

With all the things proteins do to keep our bodies functioning and healthy, they can be involved in disease in many different ways. The more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins we can design to combat the disease-related proteins and cure the diseases. Below, we list three diseases that represent different ways that proteins can be involved in disease.

• HIV / AIDS: The HIV virus is made up largely of proteins, and once inside a cell it creates other proteins to help itself reproduce. HIV-1 protease and reverse transcriptase are two proteins made by the HIV virus that help it infect the body and replicate itself. HIV-1 protease cuts the "polyprotein" made by the replicating virus into the functional pieces it needs. Reverse transcriptase converts HIV's genes from RNA into a form its host understands, DNA. Both proteins are critical for the virus to replicate inside the body, and both are targeted by anti-HIV drugs. This is an example of a disease producing proteins that do not occur naturally in the body to help it attack our cells.
• Cancer: Cancer is very different from HIV in that it's usually our own proteins to blame, instead of proteins from an outside invader. Cancer arises from the uncontrolled growth of cells in some part of our bodies, such as the lung, breast, or skin. Ordinarily, there are systems of proteins that limit cell growth, but they may be damaged by things like UV rays from the sun or chemicals from cigarette smoke. But other proteins, like p53 tumor suppressor, normally recognize the damage and stop the cell from becoming cancerous -- unless they too are damaged. In fact, damage to the gene for p53 occurs in about half of human cancers (together with damage to various other genes).
• Alzheimer's: In some ways, Alzheimer's is the disease most directly caused by proteins. A protein called amyloid-beta precursor protein is a normal part of healthy, functioning nerve cells in the brain. But to do its job, it gets cut into two pieces, leaving behind a little scrap from the middle -- amyloid-beta peptide. Many copies of this peptide (short protein segment) can come together to form clumps of protein in the brain. Although many things about Alzheimer's are still not understood, it is thought that these clumps of protein are a major part of the disease.

 Can humans really help computers fold proteins?

We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!


Read more:
Foldit 
FAQ

My efforts against childhood cancer World Community Grid team Welcomes new member!

Today My efforts against childhood cancer World Community Grid team received first New Member.

Welcome to the team and happy crunching!

Thank you for joining
LTDAkiles
Team Captain
My efforts against childhood cancer

GpuGrid.net : Volunteer computing for biomedicine

GPUGRID.net is a novel distributed supercomputing infrastructure made of many NVIDIA graphics cards joined together to deliver high-performance all-atom biomolecular simulations. The molecular simulations performed by our volunteers are some of the most common types performed by scientists in the field, but they are also some of the most computationally demanding and usually require a supercomputer.
Running GPUGRID on GPUs innovates volunteer computing by delivering supercomputing class applications on a cost effective infrastructure which will greatly impact the way biomedical research is performed.

Be part of it

If you enjoy science, you can participate by donating computing time to scientific research. Simply follow the instructions to start, gain your credits for the results you return, join a team, meet and exchange experiences with other participants in the forums.

Read more:
- GpuGrid Experiments
- GpuGrid Forums


Requirements for GpuGrid.net: Nvidia Geforce GT 220,240 and GTX 260-216, 275, 280, 285, 295, 460, 465, 470, 480 and Tesla10, Tesla20

8 Cool Science Projects That Can Run Right on Your Home Computer

Want to help search for aliens and fight diseases right from your home computer?

"Volunteer computing doesn’t get a single job done any faster [than a supercomputer], but it gets a whole lot of jobs done faster in a given time," said David Anderson, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "These projects encourage people to think more and learn more about science."

To get your computer signed up to do some science, first download a free program from the websites for the projects of interest. These data-devouring applications work on Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems. The applications can run in the background while you use your computers or they can make good use of your machine's idle time.

BOINC automatically detects a computer's speed and memory to give it a job that will not gum up the works and detract from a user's experience, Anderson said.

From: TechNewsDaily

My efforts against childhood cancer World Community Grid team have been created!

Today i took the next step with my efforts against childhood cancer and created a World Commynity Grid "My efforts against childhood cancer" team with Boinc team id #26528 .


I m hoping everyone interested about helping to get cure cancer would take part!!


You can read more about World Commynity Grid from Here
New users: To join "My efforts against childhood cancer" team Click
If you have any questions about joining our team or installing help contact me via email.
Email can be found from my profile.


Thank you!
"My efforts against childhood cancer" team Captain
LTDAkiles

NASA Conference: Astrobiology Discovery will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life!

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

For NASA TV streaming video and downlink information, visit:  http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

From: Nasa

Trial launched into neuroblastoma child cancer !

Scientists are to test if boosting the immune system can prevent the return of the childhood cancer neuroblastoma.

The disease - a cancer of developing nervous system tissue - is most often found in under-fives and accounts for about a sixth of child cancer deaths.

The Trial -
Works by hunting down neuroblastoma cells that have survived conventional treatment and attaching antibodies to specific molecules on their surface.
These antibodies then mobilise the body's immune defences to attack and destroy the cells.


More information about neuroblastoma

From BBC News

A new link between Autism and protein folding!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100910142751.htm

Folding@Home Goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases!

Folding@home is a distributed computing project - people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

What is protein folding?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software. 

The science behind Folding@home

World Commynity Grid

World Community Grid brings people together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity. It does this by pooling surplus computer processing power. We believe that innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can help make the planet smarter. Our success depends on like-minded individuals - like you.

Projects

Help us find ways to produce cleaner water.
Can one person make a difference?
Yes you can! Donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the Computing for Clean Water project to find more efficient and lower-cost methods for producing clean water.

We help researchers conquer cancer.
Why not donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the Help Conquer Cancer project to help scientists better understand and treat cancer through the discovery of proteins involved in cancer, and their function?

We're helping treat Muscular Dystrophy.
Why not donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project to help develop better treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases?

We're helping develop affordable solar energy.
Why not donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and The Clean Energy Project to help discover new materials that efficiently capture and store solar radiation as energy for later use?

Help develop new cures for diseases. 
Donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the Human Proteome Folding project to help researchers discover the function of human proteins that might end up being useful as therapeutic drugs. 

We're helping fight childhood cancer. 
Why not donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project to help find drugs to disable proteins associated with the most frequently occurring solid tumors in children? 

World Community Grid announces that members have returned more than 551 million results, Total Run Time of 407,499 years and 533,643 Members. 
LTDAkiles:  It's all about getting research done. Over 400 000 years. WOW!