You can donate your time, you can donate your money and you can join thousands of people around the world who are donating the use of their home computers to science.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) harnesses the computing power of more than a million personal computers donated by 689,000 people in 245 countries. BOINC projects include Oxford University's Climate Prediction, Berkeley's own Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the Swiss Tropical Institute`s simulation models of malaria transmission.

Just go to BOINC, choose the projects you wish to donate to, download the BOINC software and sign up. Leave your computer on and when you aren`t using it or if it is being lightly used, one or more projects around the world will borrow it. One hundred thousand volunteer PCs equal one super computer and since one super computer costs around $40 million, you can see why institutions are enthusiastically recruiting volunteer hard drives.

You must be able to trust the institutions you are allowing to use your computer. To see how many people do have this level of trust, look at All Project Stats, which keeps track of the donated time by individuals and teams of individuals from different countries.