People who pay their own electricity bills want to know which of their electronics use the most amount of electricity. And as gamers who uses consoles, you should to. Choice, an Australian consumer group, came out with a study that checks out the average power consumption of the oft-used electronic household gadgets, including consoles. Check out the results in the full article.

As consoles get more powerful, they break the boundaries of what they were originally designed for. While they were only limited to games before, they are now lending their power for use in the sciences, from medicine to computing the physics of two black holes colliding. Read more on the role of consoles in the fields of science by going to the full article.

Thanks to a tip from reader yoti93, we're letting the PlayStation 3 owners know that the Stanford University's Folding@Home service has been updated to version 1.31.

Those interested in reading this update improvements will want to visit the full article. All you have to do is click the "read more" link below.

Here's some big news for the guys who've signed up for Standford's  and Sony's Folding@Home project. The company is sending word that registered PS3 units for this shared computing project have exceeded the one million mark.

Details regarding this matter are in the full article.

With the recent updates that Folding@Home has picked up, we're sure the PS3 owners are beginning to enjoy the benefits of progressing medical science, even as they whale away in multiplayer mayhem. Now, if you're still a little confused as to how to run this feature, we've got something that may help over at the full article.

It looks like everyone's favorite distributed computing system will be getting an upgrade of sorts. The Official PlayStation Blog has announced two new features that'll be made available to the PS3 version of Folding@Home in an upcoming update: an automatic shutdown option and an option for background music play.

More on the two new features after the jump!

Curious to know how you can save hard-earned bucks from your electricity bill while your Sony PS3's turned off? We are. That's why the guys over at Aeropause managed to snag our undivided attention when they came out with some PlayStation 3 wattage readings that could potentially help lessen electricity consumption.

Details at the full article.

Thanks to the ginormous help afforded by Sony PlayStation 3, Stanford University's Folding@home project was eventually recognized by the Guinness World Records as the World's Most Powerful Distributed Computing network. This big achievement is thanks to the overwhelming participation of PS3 owners all around the world (QJ included).

Folding@home (also known as F@h) managed to reach the one petaflop mark on September 16 last month, while continued widespread participation of PS3 users enabled the PS3 to surpass one petaflop on September 23, not counting the input from other computers and devices.

To those who still aren't familiar about the Folding@home project, it is an application that lets PS3s and PCs participate in a distributed computing project that simulates the process of protein folding. Since the simulation of the entire process is too slow and tasking for a single computer to handle, Dr. Vijay Pande and the merry band of researchers from Stanford Project managed to create a single computing network dedicated for the sole purpose of simulating the protein folding process.

The success of the project was also thanks to the user-friendly F@h application: just let the PC or PS3 run the application while not playing any games, and just leaving the machine on when not in use. PS3 users only needed to contribute electricity to help improve mankind's well-being, so to speak.

This is not the only instance wherein the PS3 helps out the field of science. A cluster of eight PS3 units are currently working as a supercomputer replacement for Dr. Gaurav Khanna as he conducts his space research. Will the mighty PS3 and its powerful Cell processor find more ways in benefiting humanity? We'll see soon enough.

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781
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(Editor's Note: After the TGS, you'd think that things would go back to their "normal" pace in the gaming industry, but see, the gaming industry isn't all that "normal" to begin with. Harhar. As the Chesire Cat once told Alice: "We're all mad here." Now, if you might remember, our 13th Issue of QuickJump QuickPeek rolled out early, which means this edition might cover some news from last week which weren't included in the previous issue. Yes, it's not "normal" procedure as QuickPeek posts go. And we're saying that with a disembodied Chesire grin.)

A few days ago, we ended the previous TGS Special Edition of QuickJump QuickPeek with a series of open questions. Well, if Master Yoda had anything to say about it, it'd go somewhere along the lines of "Rumors lead to questions. Questions lead to TGS. TGS leads to answers. And answers... lead to more questions... and the eventual Hamill-tendency to scream out 'Nooooo!'"

This week though, it's anything but a miserable negative outburst. We're getting some answers all right. With us having the tendency of screaming out '"Yeeeees!" instead. How so? Let's see, shall we? M33's identity (i.e. Dark AleX, Mathiuelh, et. al.) revealed, Halo 3 week, Folding@Home's ongoing success, building anticipation for the Wii Zapper... Let's not get ahead of ourselves here though! Get busy with your mouse and start scrolling down!


Hit the Full Article link below to see the rest of this week's issue!

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) Senior Development Manager for Research and Development Noam Rimon posted an article over at the official PlayStation Blog regarding another milestone for the PlayStation 3 console in connection with Standford University's Folding@Home project.

It was only last week when we reported that the entire project has finally broken the so-called Petaflop barrier. It means that Folding@Home was finally able to accomplished more than a quadrillion floating point operations per second. Then comes today's record-breaking news, revealed by Rimon:

The influx of gamers supporting this cause has grown so greatly that we've actually broken a second record within a week! This time the aggregated computation power of the PS3 consoles - by themselves - has crossed the Petaflop line.

The output of all the participating PlayStation 3 consoles in the project now totals 1,020 TFLOPS from 41,145 participants. This is certainly a good day for PS3 owners and we'd like to conclude this one with Noam Rimon's own words, "How does it feel to be part of the most powerful distributed computer network in the world"?

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781