You can now help fight malaria without ever setting foot in Africa. The Africa@home project wants volunteers to donate time on their home computers to help control malaria in Africa. You just download some software that will run in the background and send results back to the project鈥檚 servers. The aim is to optimise strategies to combat malaria, including finding the best way to distribute mosquito nets.
鈥淲e have been testing it with 500 users and already saved years of computing time,鈥� says computer scientist Fran莽ois Grey at the particle physics lab CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which hosts africaathome.org. The team is now looking for more users.
An African university will eventually take over running the project, the latest in a growing list of similar schemes that includes the searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI@home) and gravitational waves (Einstein@home).
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