Will Wright, creator of Sim City and the upcoming Spore, has penned an inspiring essay for Wired on the ways in which video games build imagination, creativity and social consciousness.

Nanoscientists at the University of Tokyo have unveiled the first two-part molecular machine, which moves under the influence of exposure to alternating UV and visible light. The light causes a chemical bond to kink or unkink, producing a flipper-like motion in the two prongs of the molecule.

It’s not been a good week for the ‘life on Mars’ lobby. Now it seems that scientists re-examining the ‘macro-molecular carbon’ (MMC) in the meteorite ‘Allan Hills 84001’ have determined that it probably wasn’t created by biological methods, despite being an essentially organic substance.

Unlike other theories about extraterrestrial life in our solar system, this latest one from a Dr. Brett Gladman revolves around Earth being the source of that life. What Dr. Gladman and his colleaugues claim is that aside from wiping out the dinosaurs, the asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago also sent flying through space millions of planet fragments that might have contained microbes. Titan is the focus of the investigation as, according to the report, the mass of the moon would not have accelerated the incoming particles to a deadly speed.

It’s amazing how much detail web advertisers can get about web surfer behavior. I’m glad of the opportunity web advertising gives me to publish this site, but I sure get creeped out when I think how well some of the more sophisticated advertisers will be able to predict my behavior.