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An Android alarm clock that helps cure cancer & Alzheimer’s

What does your smartphone do while you sleep at night? For most of us it just sits next to the bed, plugged into a charger with an alarm set for the morning. Samsung and the University of Vienna have teamed up to create the new Samsung Power Sleep app which, along with being an alarm clock to help you wake up, also allows you to assist researchers at the university with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease research.

The app uses the same BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) system of distributed computing we reported on last year, enabling your smartphone or tablet to help process the huge amounts of data involved in decrypting protein sequences. While it sounds complicated at first the app is actually very simple in its execution. Once you’ve set the alarm all you need do is plug your smartphone into its charger. When your battery reaches 80% charge that’s when the magic happens.

The smartphone or tablet downloads a small, roughly 1MB, file from the network and begins to decrypt protein sequences with its processor. Once it finishes decrypting the file it sends the results back home and starts working on the next file. By default the app is set to only download files when connected to WiFi, but you can set it to use mobile data if you really want to help that badly. The app doesn’t interfere with any of your device’s regular functions and for those of us concerned with privacy issues it also does not get access to any of your private information such as contacts, messages or photos.

Samsung Power Sleep is available on Google Play.

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