You have probably heard about “citizen science” distributed computing projects, in which you can run a program on your computer that produces data that is used for real scientific investigations. Folding@home is another such project. You can download a program that computes configurations of protein molecules. The information your computer generates will help the investigators (who are from Stanford Unibersity) understand the process of protein folding. Here’s their web site: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage