You can participate in the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. At Home. That's right, the SETI @ Home project is one of over two dozen distributed computing projects that you can participate in from home, office, laptop. You will be donating otherwise unused clock ticks from your computer to assist in analyzing data collected from various sources. The power of tens of thousands of PCs working on a project that might only have a few hours a week of university mainframe computing time available can make all the difference in the world when it comes to finding life elsewhere in the universe, or curing terminal diseases.

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Distributed Computing. It is operated by The University of California at Berkeley and is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Why should you do this? As I mentioned, you can help solve the world's problems, for one. Another reason is that the BOINC software, which you download and install on as many computers as you can for free, is great for burnng in new servers! The software will work your computer hard when the CPU is otherwise idle.

And you can even join a BOINC team and compete to see who can do the most scientific work. Statistics are kept and all work units are logged. This is some really COOL software!