Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

CNN is reporting that the PS3 can be used to help cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or mad cow disease. This will be done by allowing Stanford University’s Folding@home project to access the Internet ready machine and its powerful Cell processor while it is not being used by the owner.

"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you’re playing a game all that horsepower will be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody’s not playing the game," said Sony’s Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."
 
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.

A network of PS3s would run even faster. Pande said that a network of 10,000 PlayStations would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today.

All that a PS3 owner would have to do to participate is download a program to your hard drive and then make sure to leave the machine on when you are not playing. The program will not run while the system is in use due to the fact that it would bog the game down, so you do not have to worry about shutting it down to play a game.

The only thing that I would be concerned with is the amount of electricity and energy the PS3 would be using if constantly on as consoles can use suck down the juice. The article makes no mention of if this program can work in some sort of standby mode or if the PS3 must actually be full on and on (for lack of a better term) it’s desktop.

Regardless, it is still an interesting and excellent idea and one that I hope works out and gets put to full use as it is a great way to help out the medical and science communities.