Collaborate for 'humanity research': it's free!

You may have heard about the SETI project, where it was asked for the collaborative union of the idle capacity of computers connected around the world to analyse vast amounts of information of signals captured from the space, searching for any extra-terrestrial communication. IBM is powering the project “World Community Grid” to contribute to different projects in humanity benefit (including AIDS, genome comparison, cancer, etc.). I have already tried it and the computer performance is not affected, try it!

There’s another curious initiative initiated in a University in Barcelona, where they want to take profit of the high capabilities of the Play Station 3 (20 times bigger that that of a normal computer). They’re researching molecular interactions that are useful for pharmaceutical research, and that requires very high calculation capabilities which become quite expensive. They discovered PS3 power and have started to recruit videogamers which can share the idle time of their consoles while connected to the internet.