I doubt many people think about protein folding when shopping for a new video game console, but if you're interested in protein folding and thinking about buying a PlayStation 3 next month, there's an article on CNN.com you should read. Apparently "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."

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, which means you can download a program onto your computer (in this case, your new PS3) that will enable you to donate 'down time' to analyze chunks of data. By dividing the "calculations into smaller packets ... [the computers can] do jobs that would strain the most powerful supercomputers." And since the PS3 has a pretty powerful graphics card, you can apparently "watch the protein as it folds."

Folding@home isn't the only distributed computing project out there: you've probably heard of SETI@home and there are a number of other projects, including Rosetta@home, the Drug Design and Optimization Lab, and fightAIDS@home.

I think this is a great idea: Sony hopes to sell 2 million PS3s in the United States and Japan in 2006 and 6 million worldwide by March, so using gaming consoles in @home projects could dramatically decrease the time needed to do these computations...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)