Google Toolbar is now more efficient than ever. They added a new feature to help Folding@Home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses. This feature allows your computer to send the result of processed data to Folding@Home as a way of distributed computing. The project is a sibling of SETI@Home, the world's largest distributed computing project based in the University of California, Berkeley.
I've been contributing to SETI@Home for a couple of years and highly recommend installing Google Toolbar to share the power of your CPU with scentific projects.