The article speculates that grids like Telescience and BIRN may one day find application for everyday uses. “The web wasn't originally intended for civilians…People have a way of repurposing powerful technologies in surprising ways,” the article notes. Telescience and BIRN were cited along with TeraGrid, NEESgrid, and MoneyBee as examples of working grid applications, which now exist mostly in the sciences.

Telescience provides through one web interface a suite of tools for end-to-end electron tomography including remote microscopy, bioinformatics, distributed computing, and collaborative visualization. Since Telescience's debut in 1992, researchers from around the world have been able to access rare, high-energy electron microscopes through this portal.

BIRN, launched in 2001, uses emerging cyberinfrastructure, such as high-speed networks, distributed high-performance computing, and software and data integration capabilities, to foster large-scale biomedical science collaborations. This data sharing will give researchers greater insight into such neurological diseases as multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. BIRN grew from the success of the Cell Centered Database (CCDB), which premiered in 2000 as one of the first Internet databases containing shared repositories for 3D microscopic imaging data.

BIRN and Telescience may serve as models for a new grid being developed to help search for a subatomic particle. The Wired article chronicles the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid, which will handle vast amounts of data gathered on a particle known as the Higgs boson. Also called the God particle, Higgs boson is expected to show why matter has mass. According to Wired, “The Higgs is the cornerstone of 21st-century physics; it simply has to be there, [or] the standard model of the universe collapses.”

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