Volunteers Put PCs to Work for Science

While you sleep, your home PC can forge new worlds in science. More researchers across the nation are embracing the concept of volunteer computing—in which they harness the power of otherwise sleeping computers to speed up the mathematical grunt work of their projects, the Chicago Tribune reports. The concept originated about eight years ago, and now hundreds of thousands of PCs are used this way.

Scientists networking individual PCs have access to the processing power of a supercomputer on the cheap, getting work done in days instead of years. An array of volunteers worldwide, from computer whizzes to Star Trek fans, can download software that prompts their computer to work on a small calculation that’s then sent back and plugged into a larger work. (More internet stories.)