Cure diseases and find alien life with your computer or phone

[MUSIC] Hey, everybody. Today I wanna show you how you can save the world by doing very little actually. You're probably by the computer or a phone, because it's 2015. And there's a chance you care about technology, because you're at c/net. Anyway, you can volunteer some of that spare [UNKNOWN] power for the greater good. First up, download BOINC manager. Oh, BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. The app is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. It's an open source software for volunteer computing and many different projects are built on it. If you open up BoInc Manager you'll see this window where you can add a project. The first one I wanna spotlight is the Rosetta at home project. It's run by the University of Washington and it models new proteins to take on diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, HIV and malaria. So that's Rosetta@home for the manager and then set up an account. The next time you're not using your computer Rosetta@home will run and help a great cause. What happens is thousands of computers are working as one, by aggregating the power of separate machines progress can be made on these projects a lot faster. What about your machine? Will it get slowed down by Boinc projects? No. On a computer Boinc is installed as a screensaver, so when you're machine is not busy it will run. Boinc's requirements are also pretty low. You could use a Windows machine with a 500 MHz processor. Mac only needs to be a PowerPC G3 or higher. You can also run some of these projects on an Android device. The setup is similar, install the Boinc app and select a project This time, let's search for extraterrestrial life with steadyathome. It searches through data from a radio telescope to find signs of life. Millions of people are part of steadyathome right now. Maybe your machine is a tipping point to finding aliens. These are just two of the projects you can contribute to. Here's some more that use [UNKNOWN] Check out mindmodelingathome, which tries to make sense of the human mind. Or worldcommunitygrid, where you can take on a number of subprojects, including mapping cancer markers, making solar technology more efficient, and decoding genomes from a wide variety of organisms. And there you have it! How to make the world a better place by being generous with your processor. For more how to's like this checkout www.howto.cnet.com. I'm Iyaz Akhtar, and I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]