If you're looking for a news story to restore your faith in mankind, this ain't it -- while en route to a monthly chemotherapy treatment for a brain tumor (the day before his birthday, no less), 7-year-old Kyle Springs and his family stopped in Dallas for a Denny's breakfast. As they left the building, with unassuming bellies full of Moons Over My Hammies, they discovered their car had been burglarized, and that thieves had absconded with Kyle's backpack, medical records, medication, and PSP.

The only uplifting facet of this otherwise soul-shattering tale is the fact that the Dallas police department had raised over $1,000 for Kyle within two and a half hours, replacing the PSP and games that he had lost in the parking lot heist. Unfortunately, the nefarious gentlemen who made off with the young man's handheld have yet to be brought to justice -- what kind of sentence do they assign people who steal adolescent cancer patient's portable electronics the day before their birthdays, anyways? Does Texas allow "jettisoning from an airlock into the infinite twilight of space" as an acceptable punishment?

Tired of wasting all those idle PS3 clock cycles curing diseases for the benefit of all humanity? Wish you could sell off your extra processing power for prizes and free stuff instead? Sony knows how you feel, and is reportedly looking into a program that would let you do just that.

Sony Computer Entertainment CTO Masa Chatani told the Financial Times that they are in discussions with a number of companies interested in using the parallel processing power of the PS3 network for their own research. Chatani realizes users might be hesitant to simply loan out use of their $600 living room computer to a commercial enterprise, so the company is considering offering incentives such as free products to users who would aid in such research.

This sounds like a win-win-win situation to us: Sony gets a new revenue stream; small companies get their research done relatively cheaply; and PS3 owners get free stuff. Of course, every PS3 running one of these commercial projects is one less project running the potentially life-saving Folding@Home. OK, so maybe it's win-win-win-lose. Still, three out of four ain't bad.

MMO Portal, a website that chronicles everything MMO related, is selling a nice annual calendar for MMO fans. The bonus? 100% of the proceeds are going to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. For anyone that hasn't shown up to a movie theater 10 minutes before the show in the past, uh, 5 years, St. Jude focuses on researching cures for diseases -- like cancer -- that take the lives of many children every year. For $14.95, the 2007 MMO calendar is a great way to get that desperately needed calendar in your house and benefit a good cause.

Re-Mission is a video game designed to help young cancer patients cope with their illness while educating them, and "increas[ing] players' sense of control over their circumstances." You pay as a nanobot named Roxxi sent into a cancer patient's body -- think Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace -- to blast away at "rapidly multiplying rogue cells." When James Paul Gee mentioned at GDC that he wanted to see "Serious Games" like Full Spectrum Virus, he was probably envisioning something just like Re-Mission.

The game, created by HopeLab, was conceived by Pam Omidyar (wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) as a way to help kids dealing with cancer. Pat Christen, the current president of HopeLab, writes in this month's Wired, "In April, [we'll] begin distri­buting Re-Mission for free in treatment centers and over the Web. We hope this game will be our first effort in a series of unusual approaches to helping sick kids - and a good excuse for teens with cancer to grab the game controller and start blasting away."

[Thanks, Evan and Dhiram]

Read - Wired: Fighting for Their Lives
Read - Yahoo!: Video game helps young people blast cancer