Folding at Home is a distributed computing project, similar to the one for SETI, that may actually work. They are doing first principles chemistry to try to learn how proteins fold.
Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
Check out the OS stats page and note the comparison between processor types.