Science Friday: Nanoweek, evolving across the universe, and why are you so happy?

Welcome to the new Science Gallery site!

It's brighter, more light coloured, and we hope it looks and feels more cheery and optimistic!

Speaking of optimistic, perhaps I should have said 'Wellcome' to the new site... we are a deceptively optimistic species after all, as this video from the Wellcome trust shows.

Now that you've been cheered up, I'll break the bad news.  The Australian government is full of hacks.  But don't you wish our government was filled with these kind? 

Mashup Australia is "a practical demonstration of the benefits that open access to Australian public sector information (PSI) can provide."

Two weeks ago at GovHack "around 150 “hackers” from all over Australia came together and built numerous incredibly sophisticated web applications and mashups," or in other words, a "web-based application that takes one or more of the Government datasets and combines them either with each other or with any number of publicly accessible web services and open datasets to create something new."

You can check out the top submissions here. Can we get something similar going here in Ireland?

And back here in Ireland, we have Nanoweek coming up.  What's new in nano? Magnetic nanotags spot cancer in mice than current clinical methods. SFI and HP jointly fund a €3.7mil project at CRANN working on the "development of technologies for flexible electronics" including ultra-light video screens. Plus, for a helicopter-view, you could always check out the European Strategy for Nanotechnology and the Nanotechnology Action Plan.

Remember back in February when the Vatican said that the Catholic church was cool with Darwin and Evolution and a few months later when they said that alien life might exist and be free from 'original sin'?    Well it came just in time for the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, and the inaugural iteration of the Evolvaphone - which opens Nov 27th at the Gallery to celebrate Darwin's seminal work.

And lastly, if you just can't get enough of WHAT IF... check out the recently closed 'Toward the Sentient City' which just finished up in NYC. And if you haven't seen WHAT IF yet, go check it out before it closes on December 13th!