Folding Forum

... have been folding for a decade or so and tried out most of the earlier BOINC projects, particularily Rosetta@Home, und finally switched mostly over to F@H, currently with the client 8.4.9 and mainly on nVidia GPU.
Mostly i am interested in medical science which was the origin of these ideas of distributed calculating.
am also running the Gridcoin Research Wallet and have connected F@H to my gridcoin account and joined the F@H gridcoin team. so far so good but overall disappointment grows.
instead of medical work, i get more and more WUs related to PFAS which i consider a waste of my hardware. to me this is on the border to pseudo-science. we don't know if PFAS will ever cause any harm to humans but we keep researching??

I set my preferences to specific diseases but no matter what i set, i will ger WUs that relate to PFAS.

Unfortunately this contributes to me loosing total interest in distributed calculating.
The fact that GRC payouts are meanwhile only symbolic is understandable although i still consider GRC a better idea than e.g. the so much hyped Bitcoin.
But the fact that aparantly ture scientific projects are fading out, makes me stop contributing.
this is unfortunate and sad, but i wanted to share it with the community. maybe in future this all gets more scientific and better organised again...

The PFAS projects are just a single batch that recently came out of beta, so it's natural that there will be many of them. As they get folded, those projects will be replaced with other ones. They won't be here for long. In fact, there are are some pure science projects that are currently undergoing internal testing as we speak. It won't be long before they hit beta, and then public.

A quick search on Pubmed suggests to me that research on PFAS is by no means a waste of my hardware and I would be happy to select it as a preferred field if it were offered. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7906952/

With many health effects noted for a relatively few example compounds and hundreds of other PFAS in commerce lacking toxicity data, more contemporary and high-throughput approaches such as read-across, molecular dynamics, and protein modeling are proposed to accelerate the development of toxicity information on emerging and legacy PFAS, individually and as mixtures. In addition, an appropriate degree of precaution, given what is already known from the PFAS examples noted, may be needed to protect human health.

Fenton SE, Ducatman A, Boobis A, DeWitt JC, Lau C, Ng C, Smith JS, Roberts SM. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Toxicity and Human Health Review: Current State of Knowledge and Strategies for Informing Future Research. Environ Toxicol Chem. 2021 Mar;40(3):606-630. doi: 10.1002/etc.4890. Epub 2020 Dec 7. PMID: 33017053; PMCID: PMC7906952.

we don't know if PFAS will ever cause any harm to humans but we keep researching??

That is exactly how science works. How would we find that out without research?

Some recent literature on this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00742-2

Some PFAS compounds have already been associated with increased chances of several cancers, digestive tract problems short of cancer, and fertility issues both male and female. They are turning out to not be the totally inert compounds Dupont and other producers have made them out to be over the last 7 or 8 decades.

Yeah, what are the odds that ingesting industrial chemicals has negative side effects.................

With all the junk in water these days everyone should be using an RO filter. Coming up with a PFAS specific membrane seems a bit odd. Though if they can come up with membrane that works on everything and has better resilience that would be nice.