Helping Science @ Home

I must say I'm the type of person who thinks science is a great thing. There are many reasons for that. One would probably be that, as a kid, I was reading a lot of sci-fi, I was part of a sci-fi club and with another 5 or so friends I've organised a RomCon (Romanian Sci-Fi Convention) in my home town when I was in highschool. Wow, some memories, huh? I also used to write sci-fi short stories, winning a second place in a contest back in Romania in highschool.

But also my background is in maths and computer science, which is science. I also liked physics although I always had a complex about not being good enough there. Also liked chemistry - that was before I went to highschool and realise what a nightmare it can be.

And to read about new science discoveries is great. Have a look at www.newscientist.com for instance.

So, in true support of science, I undertook two small initiatives that you can too, if you truly support science. Here they are:
1. Yesterday I signed the People's petition. It's about supporting medical research in the UK. That is research that uses animals too - responsibly. Many people might argue with that. However, if they discovered they have cancer for instance (touch wood), many people would suddenly change their view on things and they would love to have a cure at hand at any cost. Research is vital for us. Of course, it has to be done responsibly and the UK has one of the most controlled research legislation in the world.
Here's the petition: http://www.peoplespetition.org.uk/

2. The second thing that I've done today was to donate spare CPU cycles to science. In particular to the Folding@Home project: http://folding.stanford.edu/. This is a distributed network that tries to understand the folding of proteins which might help providing cures for different diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's Disease and others.
All you have to do is download an application that runs in the background, with low priority and this application is given computational work to do by a main server at the Stanford University. So in the end, there's a network of 200,000 computers around the world, all provided by donors, working to solve different computational models. There have been some nice results and papers published in the domain, due to this initiative. So it's not in vain and it's helping science.
I wasn't a participant in the SETI@Home program, which functioned (and maybe still is) in the similar way, but with the purpose of searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence, by computing the huge amount of data that Earth is bombarded with from space every day. I think that's pointless because the chances of discovering something like that are too slim.
But scientifical research is different and in this area there have been results from this program.