This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Our phones don't do much while we sleep, but Vijay Pande, a biomedical scientist at Stanford University,has a use for them: scientific research. So in January, along with Sony, he built the Folding@Home app, which employs unused computing power to crunch medical data in the background while your phone is charging at night. Currently, it's used to find a cure for breast cancer. "Often breast-cancer patients take medicine, and it's effective until a mutation occurs," says Pande. "Then, other cancer drugs can work, but we don't know which one, so the program simulates the effects of all the possibilities."
Folding@Home was already running on 178,000 computers, and helped find potential treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The app, released on Android, had 150,000 downloads worldwide in three months -- at one point, 53,000 phones were working at one time. "This is twice as fast as any supercomputer in the US," says Pande.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
