I posted a while back about a way to help with cancer research using your computer's “spare time.”  Well, that project is no more.  After 7 years, the company that sponsored the project decided to shut it down.  Many thanks to grid.org and everyone involved for the great work they did.

So I looked around for an alternative, and I settled on Folding@Home (FaH).  It's a Stanford University project that helps offload some of the computationally intensive research to different machines around the world, like my computer or yours.  You install a small program to your computer that downloads “work units” and number crunches them when your not using your machine. 
Its slightly different than the grid.org program in that it also works while I'm using my machine.  How does it do that? 
Well, when I'm surfing the web or writing email or whatever, I'm usually only using a small percentage of my machine's total power.   FaH uses that unused horsepower.  If email takes 10% of my CPU, FaH takes the other 90%.  I'm a little wary of always having my machine running at 100%, but so far it seems to be pretty good.  It also gives you two ways 2 limit that: you can tell it to run only when the screensaver is active (good for my workhorse programming machine) or you can pause it by right-clicking a little icon in the system tray near the clock.

You might be asking, what is “folding” and what are these “work units”?  Well, from their website...

• In order to carry out their function (eg as enzymes or antibodies), they must take on a particular shape, also known as a "fold."
• ...protein folding can be seen as a connection between the genome (sequence) and what the proteins actually do (their function)
• Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding.

The screensaver simulates protein folding on your computer and 1000's of others.  What takes about 10,000 nanoseconds in real life, takes about 10,000 days on a single computer, hence splitting the load among a ton of different machines.

How To Do It..

1. Download it here. 
2. Install it. 
3. Use 82314 as your team number (thats longlostcousins.com). 
4. Leave your computer on for a couple of extra hours each day or week. 
5. Cure Cancer.