POWER OF IDLENESS: One of those screensavers that crunches numbers when it's on actually discovered something, according to the New Scientist. Well, actually, what it did was narrow down possible drugs that could be used as a cure for anthrax to a manageable number. Says the article:

Oxford's result is a major coup for the new field of distributed processing, in which PC users donate their computer downtime to crunch data on a high profile project, like running the SETI alien signal hunting program.

Writing on the university's website, head of computational chemistry Graham Richards described the anthrax result as unprecedented. "The realm of life sciences is in for a radical shift in its approach to drug discovery," he predicts.

Of course there's a bit of controversy as the people who had these screensavers didn't know the numbers were being switched from cancer numbers to anthrax numbers. But now they're back to cancer numbers, I guess. It took them four weeks to do this anthrax thing.