Fold It

Today's thing you can do is to play another game. Fold It is a puzzle game you can download. The object of the game is to move parts of a protein to increase your score. As you play, you help come up with new, better ways of forming proteins to create better medicines as well as learn something about biochemistry. The download is about 5 megabytes, not that big, and as you get better scores, you may appear on the leaderboard online.

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BOINC

So, a while back I downloaded a program called BOINC from UC Berkeley. What it is, is after you download it, you sign up with a research project and your computer does math and runs simulations for it in the background while you do other stuff. You only see the icon in the taskbar though. You can choose to help projects that have to do with things like space, medicine, food supplies, superconductors, fusion energy and much more. This is a great way to help advance science and technology with almost no effort at all.