You're a lover, not a fighter right? But when it comes to the games you play on your PS3, we bet you love a good fight and maybe killing some people here and there. Believe it or not, now you can use your system to help fight diseases (and we aren't talking about that one you picked up on Spring Break). We are talking about the kind of diseases that doctors would love to find cures for.

Sony has paired up with Stanford University to work on what is called the Folding@Home project. By downloading the program on your PS3, your system can band together with other computers to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. This supercomputer helps the doctors at Stanford tackle more difficult problems and/or solve existing research faster and more accurately. This project studies protein folding and diseases that relate to folding such as Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's Disease, as well as some types of cancer.

If you are willing to participate, they will send you the program, you install it on your system, and then it works while the machine is idle or even in the system's background while you work. Once you download the program you will see a new icon appear in the system's cross media bar. When you open the icon, Folding@Home will start to process the work unit, which is actually just one section of the whole folding program. Then, the next time you're online, your console will send the info to the servers at Stanford. And that's it, you are officially part of science.

You don't have to be online for the program to work since it will update automatically whenever you go online, but you can't watch any Blu-ray discs or play any games while the program runs. While we can't guarantee that a hot chick will appear out of nowhere for your humanitarian efforts, we can attest that any woman will fall for a guy helping Stanford University fight illness.



» Be a part of science.