There Is a Diamond Bigger Than Jennifer Aniston’s Engagement Ring and It’s a Planet Twice the Size of Earth

I love it when Science disguises itself with Celebrity!  Gawker:

Scientists today have discovered a planet in a nearby solar system that is twice the size of planet Earth, made almost entirely out of diamond, and not at all useful to you or me.


Because of its proximity to Earth (40 lightyears, or 230 trillion miles), scientists have been able to study its chemical makeup and surface more closely than they have any other planet of this kind. Cool, right? Would be cooler if we could actually do something with it. The planet, they say, is chemically much different than Earth and is really, really hot—like 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit—rendering it largely untouchable by humans and, therefore, not a viable solution for blood diamonds. (Sorry, Africa).

How long until Future Justin Theroux tries to apprehend this planet for Future Jennifer Aniston's engagement ring anyway? Given that humans will never stop wanting to wear obnoxious jewelry and we account for the invention of both warp speed and time travel, we're still looking at roughly 30 years. Too long, thank you.

The scientists have decided to name this diamond planet "55 Cancri e," which is a stupid fucking name for a planet made almost entirely out of diamonds. Off the top of my head, here are three names that are definitely better than "55 Cancri e": "Orion's Engagement Ring," "That Diamond Planet," or "Giant Shiny Thing in the Sky." (The last one's my favorite!  That, or something simple, like "Don.")

Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle

Awesome.  The implications are Huge.  Not only for AIDS research, but for the burgeoning awareness and a newfound intellectual power found within a Collective.  From Raw Story.  Excerpts:

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.
..
Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.

Their weapon?  A science video game.

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game (Foldit) in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- using a set of online tools.

To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.

Which also leads to a milestone of equal or greater importance:

It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.

"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," Firas Khatib of the university's biochemistry lab said in a press release.

"The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."

One of Foldit's creator's, Seth Cooper had a much less imaginative explanation for the discovery:

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," he said.


Although..


"Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week's paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."

Advances not possible before.. 

What, and now How, we Create, accelerates..  The Global Consciousness begins to form, to achieve cohesion..  And the Pace continues to quicken.. 

Wow;  We live in Interesting Times!

Electrified Bacterial Filaments Remove Uranium from Groundwater

From Scientific American.  Found it on Godlike Productions.  Thank you!  Excerpts:

Hair-like filaments called pili enable some bacteria to remove uranium from contaminated groundwater. The discovery, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could aid in the development of radioactivity clean-up technologies.



Some bacteria, including a species called Geobacter sulfurreducens, are known to get their energy from reducing — or adding electrons to — metals in the environment. When uranium dissolved in groundwater is reduced in this way, the metal becomes much less soluble, reducing the spread of contamination.

Researchers have been trying to find out how the process works. They suspected that the pili might be the answer, but because G. sulfurreducens produces pili only in certain environments, the process has proved tricky to study.
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Reguera and her team were then able to show that the pili greatly increase the amount of uranium that G. sulfurreducens is able to remove. Without pili, the bacterium reduces uranium within the cell envelope, but this poisons the cell in the process. When pili are present, however, most of the precipitation occurs around the pili, which extend away from the cell. This provides a greater surface area for electron transfer, say the researchers, as well as keeping the radioactive uranium at a safe distance.

I don't mean to hurry you Scientifical types, but we got a little thing happenin' here, and we could use a whole lot of hair like filaments right about now..

Hubble Ultra Deep Field 3D

Amazing and humbling video of a scientific "gamble" researchers made by pointing the Hubble Telescope at an "empty" part of space. The resulting pictures and 3D rendering show otherwise. We as humans cannot and will not ever be able to grasp the scale of the Universe, the expanse of Infinite, or the concept of Heaven, as it relates to an Infinite Universe.. These pictures prove that.

And we will continue to grasp, struggling.
And we will continue to struggle, grasping..