Make A Difference.

by Joop Blokker

I know you care and you can help the planet by doing almost nothing. It's free and easy. Our planet's getting smaller, flatter and smarter every day, and it's no wonder with initiatives like World Community Grid. Please join the Mokum Mail group and over 400,000 people who support World Community Grid. It's a ground breaking initiative that helps accelerate research into vital humanitarian projects.

When we joined, all we had to do was download a simple and secure program. The program can detect when our computer has unused computer cycles and during these times, the computer requests work from World Community Grid's server, performs computations on this data and sends the results back. You don't have to do anything at all and it's completely safe! Also, the progam settings may easily be changed to suit your need.

Because the work is split into small pieces that are processed simultaneously, research time is cut from years to months, or even days. It is also very cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.

Your donated computer cycle time may now help find a cure for childhood cancers! There is a group of cancers that are particularly loathsome because they normally only strike young children. Neuroblastoma is one of these cancers, arising in children under the age of two and resulting in a less than 40% survival rate.

While scientists have uncovered the three proteins that enable this cancer to grow, they now need to search the three million drug candidates for a treatment. And your computer can help us complete this search in the next year.

The cause of neuroblastoma is unknown, but most physicians believe that it is an accidental cell growth that occurs during normal development of the sympathetic ganglia and adrenal glands. It occurs most often during the first two years of a child's life, and has a high risk for disease relapse with survival rates of less than 40 percent.

The rapid advancement of genetic research at Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute holds great promise for treating neuroblastoma. The new Help Fight Childhood Cancer project will use the idle computational power from your computer to identify which of the three million potential drug candidates can inhibit growth of three particular proteins believed to prevent successful treatment via conventional approaches, such as chemotherapy.

"Our promising research will be further advanced by the free computing power we will use from World Community Grid," said Dr. Akira Nakagawara, the principal investigator at the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute. "It would take us about 100 years using our own computing resources to make progress, but with access to one of the world's largest virtual supercomputers, we estimate to complete this project in two years, and begin laboratory trials."

Please CLICK HERE, register, install the program, run it and then search for and join the 'Mokum Mail Team', I know I can count on you!

Make A Difference!
Discovering Dengue Drugs

Fight Aids

Conquer Cancer

Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Human Proteome Folding

Nutricious For the World

Clean Energy

April Fools...NO Joke!

by Karen Shirron

It was 10 years ago today that a stray cat, my neighbor had been feeding for months, wandered into the yard for her meal and we noticed that her very pregnant shape was no longer pregnant!! A very simple deduction let us know that somewhere in the vicinity we had a litter of April Fool's Day kittens... Once she made them known to us (as they were in a yard behind where we lived), I walked around the block a couple times a day and started handling them and feeding them in order that I could capture them easily when the time was right. Eventually she moved them through the fence into our yard...

When they reached 6 weeks old, I did the heart wrenching task of taking them from their mother... the last thing we needed was 5 more stray cats wandering the neighborhood. Now I had the task of getting them de-flea'd, cleaned up and finding homes for them! Long story short, we kept the little white one who was the runt of the litter and named him Scrunchy as he always seemed to be squinting while outside in the sun.

Well his eyes stayed blue but his color definitely changed with time. His markings are very much in line with the fact that Daddy had some Siamese in his lines and Scrunch today has all the makings of what the Vet calls a "Flame Point Siamese".

Our little RUNT of the litter has turned into a very BIG boy!! Last weigh-in at the Vet's office showed him to be tipping the scales at 19.6 pounds (8.9 kilograms) !! Happy 10th birthday Scrunch!!

P.S.
The above story was written using the technique taught in Lesson 6 at the Mokum Mail Academy ...word wrapping text round pictures to tell a story. If you have NOT yet done the lessons, you are missing out on some useful and helpful tips in the best ways to use MM!

Kind regards,

The Mokum Mail Team:

Joop Blokker, Development.
Karen Shirron, Info & Mokum Mail Academy.
Becky Darsey, Public Relations.