For a class I am currently taking, I am working on a project with a team of other students on distributed computing. For those who do not know what it is I feel that it is a worthwhile endeavor to consider getting involved with. It is a way of connecting thousands of computers and making them work together on a research project. You can volunteer your computer to work for medical projects like cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It requires basically no effort on your part and does not even affect the performance of your computer.
All you do is download a software program, install it, and the application runs in the background. How this works is that usually you only use about 10% of your computer processor cycles at any given time. Therefore the other 90% is not being used. This is where the application comes in.
You can chose which project your idle computer processor cycles are going towards. I would recommend Folding @ Home which is working on understanding the way proteins fold. This is beneficial in eventually finding a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. You can even keep track of how your computer is contributing by comparing the amount of points you earn with other user’s. If you know other people also running the program you could also form a team.