The Folding at Home research project uses crowd sourced CPU power to help model simulations to develop treatments for diseases. You can help them by taking 5 minutes to download their client, and donate some CPU Cycles.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is awesome.
It gives you the power to use Linux within your Windows system. A Linux shell can be difficult to learn, but the payoffs are incredible. You can become insanely productive with it. I encourage every Windows developer to give this a try.