Sony steps up for some corporate responsibility as it teamed up with Stanford University's Folding@home project, and all this in order to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Using a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine, PS3 is able to run highly realistic games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Full Auto 2, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07. This chip is the same one IBM is using in its supercomputer project for the Department of Energy. This supercomputer is said to be able to reach speeds of one petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Because there is so much horsepower in this chip, Sony thought that it might be a good idea to use it for something else. This time, something that could benefit not only gamers, but the whole of mankind as well.

How does the PS3 exactly fit into the scene of medical research?

Well, in observing the process of folding, or that where proteins start out in the body as long as strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes, it is rather difficult for scientists to observe this because proteins are so small and the process is so fast--about 10 one-millionths of a second, in fact.

Now, scientists use computer simulation instead, But it takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond, so it would basically take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation, and that's a really long time. To be able to make this faster, Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves! Heck, a network of 10,000 PS3s would run even faster! Vijay Pande, leader of the Stanford Project, says that a network of 10,000 Playstation 3s would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today. "It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us."

To participate, PS3 owners need only to download a program into the console's hard drive. Then, when they're not playing, they just need to leave their machines on. The Folding@home team will then divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. But don't worry, since the program won't run when someone is using the PS3 since it might bog down the game. "What we want is for people to just have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind."

Protein formation is important as improperly-formed ones are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gherig's disease), and mad-cow disease. So now, everytime you use your PS3, you're not only using it for entertainment, but more importantly, you're contributing to significant medical research that can cure diseases. See, there's goodwill in gaming, just as it should be.