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By: John Vickers - Project Scientist: MilkyWay@Home, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

We have been getting a lot of questions lately about whether or not we are getting real scientific results, why the new sgr runs are getting better likelihoods, what the numbers crunched actually mean, what our scientific goals are, etc. In return we've posted our publications on the front page-- but, like some other BOINC user said: you guys aren't astrophysicists. I'm going to try and summarize the physics portion of this project in layman’s terms-- from the data collection to the current achievements to the future plans.

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As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Myles Allen, principle investigator with the Oxford University ClimatePrediction.net project asks the question: Will CO2 emission rationing ever be enough?

Energy and Climate: from basic physics to intergenerational equity

Looking at a 1:10,000-trillion scale model of the problem. 50 grams of coal represents 0.5 “trillion tonnes of carbon” (TtC). Burning 0.5 TtC and releasing the CO2 causes approximately 1ºC in global warming.

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The MalariaControl.net project, which models the epidemiology and natural history of the malaria parasite, has over the last couple of months, transitioned into a new phase of the project.

In a statement by Nicholas Marie, a senior project computer scientist at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel, Switzerland, he says that “We have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for two more years”. This funding will be a major boost for the malariacontrol.net project and should allow many new developments in the stochastic simulation approach to modeling the spread of malaria in Africa.

Here’s a short overview of what this new project phase will focus on:

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World Community Grid has launched the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project by the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute in Chiba prefecture, Japan. The mission of the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project is to use World Community Grid to find drugs which can disable three particular proteins associated with neuroblastoma, one of the most frequently occurring solid tumors in children.

Finding drugs to disable these proteins would potentially make the disease much more curable with chemotherapy. Neuroblastoma is one of the most common tumors in early childhood and often leads to death.

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The Einstein@Home project has started a new search for binary radio pulsars in data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This will run in parallel with the existing search for gravitational waves from rapidly-spinning neutron stars.

Einstein@Home, based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Germany, is one of the world’s largest public volunteer distributed computing projects. More than 200,000 people have signed up for the project and donated time on their computers to search gravitational wave data for signals from unknown pulsars.

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The SZTAKI Desktop Grid project recently released an exciting new application called "UC-Explorer". The goal of the UC-Explorer application is to understand basic universality classes of nonequilibrium systems.

What are universality classes and why is it important to study them?

Universality classes occur very frequently in complex systems exhibiting many degrees of freedom.

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Dotsch/UX a Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu Linux is now avalable at http://www.dotsch.de/Dotsch_UX.
 
The purpose is to make a Linux distribution for BOINC which easily installs and boot from a USB stick, hard disk and
from diskless clients and also has some interfaces to setup the diskless server and the clients automatically.
 
 
Features & Facts :

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Help us by signing a BOINC petition to the German Parliament. The members of the nonprofit associtiation Rechenkraft.net e.V. want to use the computing power of idle pcs in german federal bureaucracy, public institutions and universities for the benefit of science. As a first step, we filed this petition in which we demand the Bundestag (german parliament) to take steps for a law to implement distributed computing in the non-security sensitive computers of public facilities.

The more people sign this petition until 06.01.2009, the higher our weight in parliament will be. 50.000 petitioners during the first three weeks would allow us to present our ideas at the committee for petitions in the Bundestag itself.

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The MiniRosetta application has been updated to version 1.39. In this version, we added two important applications to MiniRosetta, docking and protein folding with explicit zinc metal ion. New features have been added to the graphic to show chain colors for a multi-chain protein complex and display metal ions by sphere.

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Don't throw out your old PC just yet - for just a few tens of pounds in electricity a year your old machine can crunch BOINC projects permanently, and thanks to wireless networking and the BOINC remote client feature, you can shove it anywhere within range of your access point and remotely administer it.. You don't even need a monitor attached to it, except for when doing maintenance or troubleshooting. And the heat output of my machine is not wasted either - it stops my tools rusting, in tandem with the freezer I have in there!