Fun with Proteins

Sometime soon, I'm going to post on the germ-fighting properties of coconut oil. (In a nutshell, your body converts the oil into a microbe killing machine--as long as the microbes are lipid coated. If you have staph or H. pylori, among other things, it could help. Cold sufferers, you're on your own.) It might even help HIV. FWIW, it helped my recent ear ache.

Meantime, I've been taking another approach to help medical science: a video game called Fold.it. Computers aren't very good at determining how proteins are folded. Some humans are good at spatial problems, but most of us don't know much about molecular biology and aren't inclined to read a book on the subject. So a group at the University of Washington created Fold.it.

I'm a bit puffed up about placing 8th out of 298 players in my first competition, and being first and third in two others in progress.

Want to try it? Go to fold.it and download the game (for free), go through the beginner's tutorial, and start playing.

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Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community. Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll. Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing. That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...

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1972: Carole King, MAS*H and...Food for 2014?

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Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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