Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Here’s a few pictures of a crystal tree that I received for Christmas. It took about 6 hours to grow to this size.

It works by pouring a salt solution into the bottom tray. This is soaked up by the tree shaped card. As the water from the solution evaporates, the salt crystals form. Then, through capillary action, more crystals form, in a process called efflorescence. The colours are generated by ink/dye that are in the card.

This is the tree once it’s been left for 24 hours.

I’m not sure which of my friends have an XBOX 360, Wii or PS3… but if your one of them and you want to add me to your buddies list so we can play online:

On the XBOX 360 I’m using the gamertag “Craig Mayhew”.

On the PS3 our username is “bethandcraig”.

On the wii our console number is “6009 6678 0620 7803″.

See you online!

P.S. If you have an PS3 you should have a look at running folding@home on it when you aren’t using it (They have changed the name to playstation life)!

Folding@home announced Thursday (18th December 2008) that they are “very excited that it looks like we may have multiple small molecules which appear to inhibit toxicity of Abeta, the protein which is the toxic element in Alzheimer’s Disease”. In English that means they may have found molecules that help prevent damage caused in Alzheimer’s disease.

Although they will have to jump several more hurdles before this can be used in a real world drug, this is a major step for Folding@home. They are also working on applying these techniques to other projects, “we have pilot projects for Huntington’s Disease underway”.

The direct link to post is below so you can read it directly from them:

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2008/12/new-fah-results-on-possible-new-alzheimers-drug-presented.html

Keep up the folding simulations everyone!!!