Why not sleep and do something good at the same time?
It’s easy, thanks to a free Android app called Power Sleep, which enables users of Samsung smartphones and tablets to donate their phone’s unused computing power to help scientists in their fight against cancer.
Developed by Samsung in Austria in collaboration with the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Vienna, the app essentially doubles as an alarm clock. Here’s how it works: Once set, the idle processing power of your phone is used to crunch protein data while you sleep. When your alarm rings, the calculations are then stored in a database that assists researchers worldwide with the decryption of protein sequences for cancer research.
The project is based on the University of Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, which connects thousands of computers around the world to conduct intensive research.
