These end users do more than just refine products: they are a living global idea lab.

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On that subject, all the signs are of "tacit support, " says Helmi Noman, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

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But it has inspired other schemes, including a Stanford University study of how protein chains fold in on themselves and a global weather-forecasting model at the Rutherford Appleton Lab in Britain.

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