Silver Phoenix Pagans are a folding@home team. Folding@home is sponsored by Stanford University and benefits research into various diseases that are affected by protein folding. I'm not a scientist and I can't tell you more about "folding" but I can tell you this affects research into Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many forms of cancer.

Supporting folding@home is a way to help, without it costing you money. You download some software and run it on your machine. That's it. (No, this isn't a virus, it's Stanford University, stop being so paranoid.) This is something called distributed computing. You can set it to run in the background or only when your machine is in idle (screensaver mode). I do recommend the screen saver mode, as it helps avoid conflicts with some video games. What happens is the software downloads a "work unit" -- some piece of calculation that needs to get done. Your machine does the work and the software sends the results back up to Stanford University. The software can be downloaded for pretty much any type of machine, with any operating system. There's even a version for the Playstation 3 that is cooler than the one for the PC.

Statistics are kept on how many work units you do. Statistics are also kept for teams. A couple of us who belong to the Circle of the Silver Phoenix decided to do this and make a team. You do not have to be a member of the Silver Phoenix to join the team. It's just a neat way to keep track and it's another little place where we can point to Pagans trying to help the world around us. If you want to join our team, click on the folding@home link and enter our team number, 132612, on the configuration tab when you've installed the program. To check our stats, you can go to the stats page and search for Silver_Phoenix_Pagans. Note that the stats are updated several times during the day and you won't be able to get stats when that is occuring.