If you want to help fight cancer, but aren't a scientist or phillantropist, you can donate your computer's power to a distributed computing project. The idea is to let your computer do little bits of science and send the results back to the project. Along with thounsands of other computers, what you effectively have is a share in a global super-computer. What kind of science do these cancer fighting projects do? I have no idea. But here's the founder talking about it.

The F@H blog is reporting that ATi's R600 core  (like the 2900 XT and 3850 series of video cards) will be supported in the coming weeks. The advantage of using a GPU over a CPU to do this kind of work is supposed to be enormous. The older ATi cores, namely the x1xxx series could do the work 30-40 times faster than a PC. I can only assume that the newer R600 will be faster still. Great news for the project.

The bad news is that these newer GPUs will burn energy to do this work. Maybe close to what two 100W lightbulbs would use. You could probably argue this is engery wasted...but at least the intentions are good.