Sony’s new Folding@Home Android app lets you fight cancer and Alzheimer’s while you sleep
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Sony’s new Folding@Home Android app lets you fight cancer and Alzheimer’s while you sleep
White-collar professional by day, caped crusader by night? Well, not quite. But version 2.0 of Sony’s Folding@Home Android app lets you contribute to an equally noble cause at little expense to yourself. Now you’ll be able to pool your phone’s processing power with thousands of others out there to help advance research into major diseases like breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, all while you’re sleeping.
Folding is essentially the use of distributed computing to help study and simulate how proteins fold and misfold, hence the name. Protein folding research requires a stupendous amount of processing power – on the level of supercomputers – but every time someone uses the Folding@Home app, they contribute their phone’s processing power to this research. This means that research projects can be completed in a far shorter time than before.
Unlike previous versions that stopped running once users exit the app, Folding@Home 2.0 lets users collaborate continuously. You can now set the app to run at any time, so you can contribute to research at any time, including when you’re sleeping.
The new app also introduces gamified and social elements to encourage users to use it. It ties in with Google Game services and lets you compete against friends in terms of processing time or earn achievements for collaboration.
Of course, the entire process will require quite a bit of data and battery, so you should ensure that your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network and wall or wireless charger if you intend to set it to run overnight.
Folding@Home can be downloaded from the Google Play Store here.
