Folding@home turns PS3 into the console equivalent of Johns Hopkins

[Psst – Join the Destructoid Folding Group!  #55789 ] 

Yesterday, PlayStation 3 firmware upgrade 1.6 finally went live and with it came the awesome distributed-computing, disease-fighting power of Folding@home. If you aren’t reading Slashdot daily, you might have glossed over this whole Folding@home phenomenon, so allow me to spell it out for you; Folding@home is a program that links hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of computers all over the world together so that all of the spare, idle processor cycles that would normally go to waste while you’re bathing, sleeping or masturbating can be better used to help scientists study how amino acids “fold” within the human body, thus granting insight into diseases caused by this process going haywire, such as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Parkinson’s and Pacman Fever. 

According to the above-linked article from Next-Gen, there were fourteen thousand PS3 owners running Folding@home as of noon yesterday, a group no doubt dedicated to the eradication of disease and finally figuring out why the hell they actually purchased that black doorstop.

(Editor’s Note: Honestly, it was a toss up between the above punchline and a joke about how they couldn’t afford any games after spending six Bejamins on a sub-par Foreman Grill, but the one I went with had swears, so, obviously, it was the victor. — Nex)

(Editor’s Note #2: If you stare really hard at the Folding@home screensaver, and cross your eyes just a little bit, you can make out a boat with a penis on the sail. — Nex)

(Editor’s Note #3: No, wait … scratch that … it’s Ernest Borgnine. — Nex)