Goodbye.  Me am Bizarro Mike.  Me am writing post from Bizarro world.  Here on Bizarro world things am different from world you live on.  On Bizarro world cigarette smoking am good for you and help fight cancer.  On Bizarro world kids am loving vegetables and cry if you am making them eat candy.  On Bizzaro world XBox 360 am revolutionary machine used to fight heart disease.

What you mean that not only happen on Bizarro world??

Ok, Real Mike here.  I hate to burst Bizarro Mike’s bubble, but I was afraid that if I didn’t take over the article soon I’d hear the sound of my editor’s head exploding in a fit of utter and complete apoplexy.  The fact of the matter is, though, that a scientist in England has come up with a way to use the XBox 360 to detect heart defects.

Simon Scale, from the University of Warwick, came up with the idea based on a “little shooter game” he worked on while he was a software engineer at Microsoft’s Rare Studio.  In the game the players fought in an arena that was modeled after the human heart.  Scale took those designs and created a model of the human heart that tracks how the signals in the human heart move around damaged cardiac cells.  In doing so he’s created a system that can help physicians detect heart defects and conditions like arrhythmia.

What’s most impressive is that by using the powerful processors in the XBox 360 to accomplish this Scale has developed a method to detect these conditions that is “five times faster and 10 times more cheap” than current modeling software.  The XBox 360 isn’t the only platform being used for science, either.  Researchers in at the University of Massachusetts are using a Playstation 3 to study black holes.

It looks like the practice of converting video game consoles into medical devices happens outside of Bizarro world!