Did you know that you can help cure diseases just by letting your computer run while you do other things? Folding@home is a program that lets you make use of your computer’s unused cycles (like when you’re browsing Facebook) to perform protein folding computations that help researchers understand diseases better. By using your idle computer power to complete small work packages, you act as part of a giant research supercomputer!

Check out the the website here to learn more, watch the video, and download.

While Folding@home runs silently in the background, there are also options to dedicate more (or less) resources to folding,

as well as to get specific information about the folding such as your individual project package description, progress, and folding rate.
You can even choose which disease you have a preference for helping with.

There is also an option to watch the live protein folding:

So, give it a try! The next time someone asks why you’re looking at funny pictures of cats, let them know you’re curing disease.