Stanford Helps Fight Alzheimer's with PS3

Stanford Helps Fight Alzheimer's with PS3

blog.washingtonpost.com

Scientists at Stanford University are hoping that video game fans will soon donate their PlayStation 3s to the good cause of finding a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

With the next software update for the game console, PS3 owners will be given an option to click an icon for Stanford's "Folding@home" project and download software that the university has designed to help outsource the computing power of the game consoles (which are essentially computers) needed for some of its research.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This appears to be a program which will be downloaded via PS3 update, it seems interesting.

blog.washingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Stanford research is going to go nowhere when all of its nurses are going out on strike soon

Its interesting research though good find

I found another article on the new PS3 science program here:

PlayStation3 Lends a Hand to Medical Science

The newest release for the PlayStation3 (PS3) will not give you a sore thumb, but it may help researchers come up with drugs for Alzheimer's. Sony announced today that beginning March 23, PS3 users will be able to take part in simulations to study how proteins fold into the clumps that litter the brains of Alzheimer's patients, speeding up those simulations dramatically—if enough gamers join in.
Cells build proteins by linking amino acids into a chain, which spontaneously folds into a three-dimensional shape that lets the protein do its various jobs. Researchers suspect that diseases such as Mad Cow, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from proteins that fold improperly and get tangled together, thereby gumming up the brain. But simulating that process—to understand it and come up with drugs that interfere with it—is difficult even for the fastest computers.