When next your friends ask you what you are always doing on your phone, you can now say “I’m saving lives here!”. Sony’s Folding@Home groundbreaking app that makes use of your smartphone’s processing power to “simulate the complex movements of proteins as they change shape.” just received a big upgrade. If you know nothing about the Folding@Home app, scientists use it for medical research of diseases like Alzheimer’s or breast cancer by using your phone’s processing power to help with protein folding research.

The protein we’re researching takes about 300,000 nanoseconds to fold, and a smartphone can simulate about one nanosecond per day, that gives you some idea of the scale we’re working with, but if 10,000 phones work eight hours a day, the project could be complete in less than three months! The latest update to the app will make it simpler and more enjoyable for people to get involved in this important research, and provide a great boost to our team and its efforts.Dr Vijay Pande from Stanford University

The new Folding@Home 2.0 now gives users the ability to continuously contribute to the research at any time, even while you are asleep. The new update comes with updated UI and gamified elements which allows you to log into Google Game Services account to earn achievements while competing against friends and enhanced social sharing. I wonder why the app has just 150,000 users and only 70,000 connected smartphones, come on humans, we can do better than just taking selfies with our “smartphones”. See the download link below, you’ll you’d never know who’ll benefit from your phone’s processing power someday.

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