Having fun and helping science

The new Playstation will analyze proteins' structure to advance the research for a cure for several illnesses whenever it's idle from playing games:

Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Improperly formed proteins are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gherig's disease, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad-cow disease.
[...]
Proteins start out in the body as long strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes -- a process scientists call folding -- before they can do anything. The challenge for scientists is that folding is difficult to observe because proteins are so small and the process is so fast -- about 10 one-millionths of a second.

Scientists are using computer simulations instead, but that has its own limitations. It takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond (one-billionth of a second) so it would take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation.

Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves. Dividing the complicated calculations into smaller packets enables the computers to do jobs that would strain the most powerful supercomputers.
[...]
"It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us," he said. "It's more than us just being impatient, there are calculations that we don't run right now because any calculation that would take more than two or three years, we don't even start it."

I like it when we can put everyday machines we use for entertainment to good use when they're not in use.