(Computerworld) -- Looking for a perfectly good reason to buy a Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) game system? How about this: Starting at the end of this month, PS3 users can help researchers at Stanford University find a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. last week said that its next software upgrade for the PS3 system will support a feature that allows users to add their systems to a collection of more than 200,000 PCs collectively crunching numbers for a Stanford project called Folding@home (FAH).
Launched in 2000, FAH is a SETI-like distributed computing project aimed at understanding a process called protein folding in which proteins take on a particular shape before carrying out their function as an enzyme or antibody. Stanford researchers are working on simulating the folding process to understand why proteins sometimes misfold and cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis.
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