From WCG: Ebola outbreak

Origin Story

The Origin Story for the Blog

I am telling the reader this story in the hope of impelling him or her to find their own story and start a wordpress blog. We all have a story. Find yours.

The oldest post I can find for this blog is From FermiLab Today: Tevatron is Done at the End of 2011 (but I am not sure if that is the first post, just the oldest I could find.)

But the origin goes back to 1985, Timothy Ferris Creation of the Universe PBS, November 20, 1985, available in different videos on YouTube; The Atom Smashers, PBS Frontline November 25, 2008, centered at Fermilab, not available on YouTube; and The Big Bang Machine, with Sir Brian Cox of U Manchester and the ATLAS project at the LHC at CERN.

In 1993, our idiot Congress pulled the plug on The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 Tev per proton and was set to be the world’s largest and most energetic. It would have greatly surpassed the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider, which has ring circumference 27 km (17 mi) and energy of 13 TeV per proton.

If this project had been built, most probably the Higgs Boson would have been found there, not in Europe, to which the USA had ceded High Energy Physics.

(We have not really left High Energy Physics. Most of the magnets used in The LHC are built in three U.S. DOE labs: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Also, see below. the LHC based U.S. scientists at Fermilab and Brookhaven Lab.)

I have recently been told that the loss of support in Congress was caused by California pulling out followed by several other states because California wanted the collider built there.

The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems, cited as having no immediate economic value.

Some where I learned that fully 30% of the scientists working at CERN were U.S. citizens. The ATLAS project had 600 people at Brookhaven Lab. The CMS project had 1,000 people at Fermilab. There were many scientists which had “gigs” at both sites.

I started digging around in CERN web sites and found Quantum Diaries, a “blog” from before there were blogs, where different scientists could post articles. I commented on a few and my dismay about the lack of U.S recognition in the press.

Those guys at Quantum Diaries, gave me access to the Greybook, the list of every institution in the world in several tiers processing data for CERN. I collected all of their social media and was off to the races for CERN and other great basic and applied science.

Since then I have expanded the list of sites that I cover from all over the world. I build .html templates for each institution I cover and plop their articles, complete with all attributions and graphics into the template and post it to the blog. I am not a scientist and I am not qualified to write anything or answer scientific questions. The only thing I might add is graphics where the origin graphics are weak. I have a monster graphics library. Any science questions are referred back to the writer who is told to seek his answer from the real scientists in the project.

The blog has to date 900 followers on the blog, its Facebook Fan page and Twitter. I get my material from email lists and RSS feeds. I do not use Facebook or Twitter, which are both loaded with garbage in the physical sciences.

That is my Origin Story

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richardmitnick 1:52 pm on May 12, 2017 Permalink Reply
Tags: BOINC ( 130 ), Ebola outbreak ( 2 ), Outsmart Ebola Together ( 8 ), WCG ( 153 )
From WCG: Ebola outbreak

World Community Grid (WCG)

The World Health Organization just announced three recent deaths from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which may grown into a new outbreak of the disease. Please support the Outsmart Ebola Together project and help scientists find better treatments for this deadly virus.

Outsmart Ebola Together

You can help researchers at The Scripps Research Institute find a cure for Ebola by donating your computing power to this project and encouraging others to join.

You can also support the research team by contributing to The Scripps Research Institute’s crowdfunding campaign. The team will use these funds to analyze the enormous volume of data generated by Outsmart Ebola Together and study the most promising drug candidates.

The Ebola virus is a significant global health threat and is a growing humanitarian crisis in Africa, killing thousands of victims in 2014.

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ebola-fever-virus-infection

If not handled properly, an Ebola outbreak can turn into an epidemic, overwhelming regional health services and disrupting trade and the delivery of social services, causing the welfare and economy of a region to deteriorate. The ongoing viral load in the human population increases the likelihood of further mutation. Additionally, the virus’s long incubation period and our highly connected modern world could allow the virus to spread to new geographies and across oceans.

Currently, there are no approved treatments or vaccines for this deadly disease, and the search for an effective antiviral drug to treat the disease is a high priority. While previous outbreaks have ended when the disease disappeared from the human population, the scope of the 2014 outbreak raises the possibility that the virus, rather than disappearing again, could become endemic – permanently persisting in human populations in one or more areas.

Outsmart Ebola Together on World Community Grid aims to help researchers at The Scripps Research Institute develop a treatment for Ebola virus. The computational power donated by World Community Grid volunteers is being used to screen millions of candidate drug molecules to identify ones that can disable the Ebola virus.

See the full article here.

Ways to access the blog:
https://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

“World Community Grid (WCG) 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.”
WCG projects run on BOINC software from UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

CAN ONE PERSON MAKE A DIFFERENCE? YOU BET!!

My BOINC

“Download and install secure, free software that captures your computer’s spare power when it is on, but idle. You will then be a World Community Grid volunteer. It’s that simple!” You can download the software at either WCG or BOINC.

Please visit the project pages-

FightAIDS@home Phase II

OpenZika

Help Stop TB

Outsmart Ebola together

Mapping Cancer Markers

Uncovering Genome Mysteries

Say No to Schistosoma

GO Fight Against Malaria

Drug Search for Leishmaniasis

Computing for Clean Water

The Clean Energy Project

Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together

Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy

Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Help Conquer Cancer

Human Proteome Folding

FightAIDS@Home

World Community Grid is a social initiative of IBM Corporation
IBM Corporation

IBM – Smarter Planet
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