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A ROUND-UP OF THE LATEST NEWS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD

HELP BEAT CANCER... WHILE YOU SLEEP

VODAFONE has teamed up with Imperial College London to harness the idle power of your smartphone to help speed up cancer research.

By downloading the app DreamLab, you can help Imperial College crunch data while you sleep.

The app harnesses the collective power of smartphones across the nation to analyse data while the phone is not being used.

As part of the project, called DRUGS (Drug Repositioning Using Grids of Smartphones), a team led by Dr Kirill Veselkov from Imperial’s Department of Surgery & Cancer, has designed an algorithm that breaks down enormous datasets into small chunks. Through DreamLab, these small data chunks will be analysed by a network of smartphones to find links between datasets which could help identify more effective combinations of existing drugs to treat cancer.

A desktop computer with an eight-core processor running 24-hours a day would take 300 years to process the data available. But a network of 100,000 smartphones running six hours a night could do the job in just three months.

The app is free to download and free to use for Vodafone customers, meaning it does not eat into monthly data allowances. Search for DreamLab in the App store for iOS or Play Store for Android.

MICROSOFT STILL GIVING WINDOWS A ONCE-OVER

REMEMBER Windows 10? It’s been updated, which may come as a surprise to those of us still using Windows 7. For a start there’s a new ‘timeline’ feature, which is basically a fancy searchable history of everything you’ve done on your PC.

Then there’s Focus Assist, which allows you to mute notifications for a set period of time.

There are system-wide improvements to dictation, and some improvements to Microsoft’s AI assistant Cortana to allow control of smart home device.

Handy stuff, but it still feels like Microsoft is playing catch up.