As Covid-19, also known as coronavirus, spreads across the globe, people are scrambling to look for a possible cure from the contagious virus, but it could be as simple as lending your computer’s unused power.
Folding@Home (FAH) is a distributed computing project that uses spare processing power from people’s computers to aid in disease research. FAH has joined lab researchers to work toward a cure for the coronavirus and is encouraging people to download the free program to their computers.
You can download FAH if you are running macOS 10.6 or above, Windows XP SP3 or newer, 64-bit Linux, and 32-bit Linux.
“By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@Home Consortium, where researchers are working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies,” FAH’s website says. “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 life-saving drugs.”
FAH specifically looks at protein folding in different diseases. Researchers from labs at universities across the country use your unused data to combine computer simulations and experiments to understand the different parts of a protein and how to control a protein with drugs and mutations.
In the past, FAH has lent its resources to help breast cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, the Ebola virus, and more in advancing research. The coronavirus is the newest disease that FAH has committed to helping find a cure.
Several nations have already begun work on a coronavirus vaccine; however it would still probably take months to distribute globally, and by then, the number of people infected will be even higher.
In total, there have been more than 94,200 confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and 3,214 confirmed deaths. The virus is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, but there have been confirmed cases in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and more countries around the globe. It has caused massive travel discrepancies, tech company closures, major event cancellations, and more.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.