From CNN:
Kids aiming to persuade their parents to buy the PlayStation 3 have some new ammunition — donating their PS3’s down time to researchers could help cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or mad cow disease…
“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.