It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. - Albert Einstein
Fold It is a game developed by the University of Washington (of Rosetta@Home protein folding fame), which lets people interact with proteins as puzzles. The objective is to fold proteins as efficiently as possible, which is done by wiggling and shaking it and manipulating details of the proteins. The game includes a number of tutorial levels which allow for practice in the art of protein folding. The game keeps on-line scores and lets users compete in groups as well.
The program currently is available for Windows and Macintosh, with a Linux version coming. The game can be downloaded at http://fold.it.
One of the galaxy's most massive young star clusters is revealed in a stunning new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The star-forming nebula NGC 3603 lies in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy (Video: ESA/M Kornmesser/L L Christensen/R Gendler/M Pugh/Astromania de Yave)
Some of the heaviest known stars in the galaxy reside in this massive young cluster imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope (Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA)
The cluster of thousands of stars lies 20,000 light years from Earth in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy. It is embedded in a star-forming nebula called NGC 3603, a cloud of gas and dust with enough material to form 400,000 stars like the Sun. Watch a video zooming in on the star cluster's location in the sky by clicking on the image at right.
Most of the bright stars in the image are very hot and massive. Their radiation and stellar winds have blown out a large cavity in the nebula around them.
The three brightest ones at the heart of the cluster had previously appeared to be more massive than theory allows. But the Hubble investigation, led by Jesús Maíz Apellániz of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain, hints that each of these objects may actually be a blurring of light from two or more individual stars that are too close together to be observed as separate objects.
Previous measurements by Hubble and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile had come to the same conclusion for two of these star systems, indicating that the heaviest star involved is as massive as 114 Suns, which is at the borderline of what some theoretical models allow.
The new investigation also indicates that the most massive stars have gathered at the cluster's centre, something that has previously been observed in more massive groupings called globular star clusters. Globular clusters behave like cosmic sorting machines. Over time, interactions between the stars cause the most massive ones to settle near the centre of clusters, while less massive stars stay farther out.
Also appearing in the image are some dark and extremely cold "Bok globules" at top right. Bok globules are dense clouds of dust and gas with between 10 and 50 times the mass of the Sun. Among the coldest objects known in the universe, with temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero, they are thought to be condensing and on their way to forming new stars.
ALIEN-hunters hoping to eavesdrop on extraterrestrial TV may be in for disappointment.
It has been suggested that the next generation of radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, now being built in the Netherlands, could be used to detect radio noise from alien radio and TV. So Marko Horvat, a computer scientist at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, calculated the odds of detecting alien civilisations of different lifespans from their radio signals. If, for example, 10 civilisations, each with a lifespan of 250,000 years, live within radio reach of Earth, the probability that one of them will be detected is about 9 per cent. That sounds good, but it assumes we have near-perfect telescopes scanning the entire sky constantly - an ideal far from being realised. "We need much better telescopes," Horvat says.
Worse still, if there are 10 alien civilisations with a much longer lifespan, the chances of detection drop to almost zero (www.arxiv.org/abs/0707.0011). That's because they will probably have developed better means of communication. "We need the civilisations to die out quickly and rapidly be replaced by new short-lived ones for the maximum chance of detection," he says. "It's a very pessimistic conclusion."
Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.
According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.
Staff now alert the families of residents when he sits down next to their ailing loved one.
"He doesn't make many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," David Dosa, a professor at Brown University who carried out the research, told the Associated Press news agency.
Oscar was adopted as a kitten at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre.
The cat is said to do his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses at the home, but is not generally friendly to patients.
Butterfly shows speedy evolution at work #258 Richard 2007-7-13 21:37
An international team of researchers has documented a remarkable example of natural selection in a tropical butterfly species that fought back - genetically speaking - against a highly invasive, male-killing bacteria.
Within 10 generations that spanned less than a year, the proportion of males of the Hypolimnas bolina butterfly on the South Pacific island of Savaii jumped from a meager 1 percent of the population to about 39 percent. The researchers considered this a stunning comeback and credited it to the rise of a suppressor gene that holds in check the Wolbachia bacteria, which is passed down from the mother and selectively kills males before they have a chance to hatch.
"To my knowledge, this is the fastest evolutionary change that has ever been observed," said Sylvain Charlat, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher with joint appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and University College London. "This study shows that when a population experiences very intense selective pressures, such as an extremely skewed sex ratio, evolution can happen very fast."
