The console war has reached an odd phase where the three majors are morphing into each other—or at least the two powerhouses are emulating Nintendo’s now-gen leading Wii. The Xbox 360 is prepping a fall dashboard update which will include Mii-like “avatars” (though Microsoft developer Rare claims to have come up with the idea first) while Sony, whose PS3 motion-sensitivity was a last-minute addition, recently-released “Life With Playstation” service which offers real-time, spinning 3D globe-based news (from Google), weather (from the Weather Network) and live camera images (from The Earth Television Network) for 60 cities around the world. In essence, it’s a higher-res version of the Wii’s similarly-themed channels and will soon expand further.

But what makes Life awesome is that while it's neat and all, it's really a bait-and-switch to get more gamers using Sony’s pre-existing Folding@Home service, which is designed to help fight diseases. Seriously. Folding is a “distributed computing” project basically hands your PS3’s graphics processor (the much-vaunted Cell Broadband Engine) over to the molecular biologists at Stanford University who use it to simulate how proteins fold and misfold—which you get to see in a cool screensaver-esque simulation. The end goal is suss out why diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Mad Cow, Huntington’s and even cancer develop in the first place so we can finally kibosh 'em.

Launched way back in 2000, it’s evolved into the Guinness-declared world’s most powerful distributed computing cluster with calculations carrying on in the background of many PCs and Playstations. 3.3 million devices have donated processing power since the project launched, including over 1 million PS3 users and Sony says that as of earlier this year, PS3ers were providing nearly 3/4 of the overall computing power.

What’s cool about Life is that Folding works in the background when PS3 owners are checking the weather in Dublin or news reports from DC, so it’s bound to give a big boost to those numbers. (If only they could only get it running while everyone starts playing LittleBigPlanet in a few weeks!)

Anyway, with Christmas rolling around, be sure to tell your parent/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend that buying you a PS3 could cure cancer. Really, it’s for their own good.