Spare Me Your Cycles

Want to help humankind without lifting a finger? Well..... almost,
that is. You still have to type on your keyboard and click the mouse
to download these two programs. I'm talking about two href="http://www.answers.com/distributed%20computing">distributed-computing
projects called href="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/">SETI@home and
folding@home.

SETI@home is
a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (hence the acronym, SETI). You participate by running a screensaver that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data
in the background. That just means that when the screensaver is
running it uses your computer to crunch numbers. It stops when you
decide to use your computer. Read more about it here: href="http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html">http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html.

folding@home is a bit more down to earth (excuse the pun). Its a distributed computing
project which studies protein folding, the biochemical process that
assembles the building blocks of life (or at least that how i
understand it). Why is folding so important then? Diseases like
Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an
inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to be
caused by protein misfolding.

You can download the two here:
SETI@home - http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php
Folding@home - http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Both are also available in Linux and Mac versions ;-)) No need to mention MS-W.

Download them today! Write about them in your blogs and homepages! Put
them in your email signatures! Let's get crunching!