This isn't the first app to target unused computing cycles for scientific research. Last year UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory released BOINC, an app named after its Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project that effectively does the same thing, minus the alarm clock feature. BOINC also lets people pick other distributed projects like identifying asteroids and monitoring earthquake activity. Power Sleep is actually based on BOINC, Cheil says, but focuses specifically on protein calculations.
Power Sleep is only for Android devices running 2.3 and above, and can be found on Samsung's App Store and Google Play. And for the curious, its creators say the only thing that's being collected are protein calculations, and not any personal data.