How about science problems that need a little bit of crowdsourced brainpower? Turns out the human brain is pretty good at pattern recognition, and might be better at predicting certain aspects of protein structures than computers. You can be a part of that research!
http://fold.it/
Fold it Website wrote:What big problems is this game tackling?
Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
