Xbox, for Your Health!

Simon Scarle used to work as a software engineer for Rare, the Microsoft-owned video game development studio responsible for Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country, and the Xbox Live avatar you've created to present yourself to the world as someone cuter than you actually are. But Scarle is now a computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England, where he's put his gaming background to good use. Dissatisfied with the piddling processors used by medical science to process heart rhythm data, Scarle tricked out an Xbox 360 to use its enhanced processing power for the same purpose. The result is a machine that can crunch more numbers in a shorter amount of time for less money than traditional heart diagnosis computers. Which either goes to show just how much technology you might have in your home without really noticing or how atrociously inefficient the direct market medical tech business actually is. More details here.