can someone explain where the electrons could come from for the proposed carbon capture reaction? Could you just put an annode/cathode into the mix with a generator and have the electrons free like that or would it need to be in the form of ATP or something similar?

excellent question. you could just put in an annode/cathode, but this still begs the question of where the current comes from. one possibility is nuclear power plants at night when demand for electricity is way down. the problem of course is that reducing C02 requires energy input; the options are sunlight (put the engineered enzymes into photosynthesizing organisms) and not too many other possibilities.

thanks David. In that case (if a simple anode/cathode could be used) this would be perfect. If it could produce ethanol or something similar then that would be fantastic, although i guess you can always produce ethanol from sugars using traditional methods anyway :)

(Enviromission video is here: http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/video/video.htm)

Another way to put it is that SETI is giving your AMD machine more credit then the work produced would likely deserve.

Credits granted by Rosetta are based on work completed. Each task returned is typically made up of many models computed. Some types of machines are able to crunch a model more efficiently then others. Large CPU cache size is one factor that helps.

Find a task on each of the machines with a very similar name, and compare the number of "decoys" shown in the result file. Now divide the number of CPU seconds by the number of decoys. That shows the number of seconds the machine took for each model. You will see that your AMD machine takes more seconds to complete a model then your other.

The credit "claimed" is based on the BOINC benchmarks, which do not at all measure the ability of your processor cache, nor the amount of memory available. The credit "granted" is based on the amount of work completed. When the two numbers differ significantly, it indicates that the benchmarks do not utilize the portions of the machine needed for Rosetta to run. The benchmarks are not specific to Rosetta. Even withing Rosetta, different task types have slightly different performance characteristics.