Playstation 3 Will Cure Cancer

Medical researchers at Stanford have launched a project called Folding@Home, which is a program that simulates protein-folding (the continuing study of which is expected to lead to breakthroughs in curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more) designed to run on distributed Playstation 3s. The page suggests that if enough people already in possession of a PS3 are willing to run this program, which is available as part of the Home service, once in a while—and this would entail simply navigating to the application on the Sony network and then leaving your PS3 on while you go run errands or sleep—the combined processing power behind said program will exceed what would be attainable by a traditional supercomputer. They've gone a step further and made it competitive, allowing "players" to form teams and ranking teams on their progress. This latter feature was obviously intended to arouse interest, and it seems to be working.

A PC version is also available.

(via Penny Arcade)