*Videos from CNN and Youtube – Screenshot from CNN Video Capture

In a tragic accident, Emily Huntington lost her life while texting and driving. Inspired by their love and thirst for change, her friends and community joined together to produce a Public Service Announcement in hopes to minimize further accidents.

Though the lost was terrible, perhaps they will save more lives with their efforts.

*Original Article by Jessica Marshall or Nature.com/ Screenshot from Nature Video

Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein.

The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.

The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins¹, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players’ best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work is published today in Nature Biotechnology².

“I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it,” says Justin Siegel, a post-doctoral researcher working in biophysics in Baker’s group. “Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.”

Read the rest here.

* Photos from Video Capture

In a project by Bartholomaus Traubeck, he discovered a way to listen to the sweet music that trees produce. How? He created a record player that reads the rings of a tree and translates them into piano keys.

According to his site for his project Years:

“A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.”

So every tree will have a different tune. It would be interesting to see if certain types or ages of trees create a specific genre of music. How would a quick growing tree differ from the old and wise Redwood?

Either way, this gives us a new perspective of how the world sings around us. The sound of Ohm exists and now we can hear the music in the life of trees. All we needed was a special record player to tune in.

monk joe

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

This a simple but beautiful story about love…

The Indescribable Nth from Steve Moore on Vimeo.

Happiness can be quite simple…

Featuring: Melissa Skirboll
Music by: Kevin Shima
Film by: Monk Joe

Brought to you by:
www.wtmonk.com
www.monkme.com

* Article originally appears on CTVNews.ca on Mon. Dec. 5 2011 5:35 PM ET

*This is a beautiful young man’s story of how to survive, thrive and love. Blessings MonkJoe

Stars Reach Out to Bullied Teen Who Shares Fears in Video
An eighth-grade boy’s compelling flash-card video message about being bullied, self-mutilating and contemplating suicide has gone viral and prompted messages of support from celebrities including Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin…

Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20111205/jonah-mowry-viral-video-gay-cutting-suicide-111205/#ixzz1hEFUD6Q6

witness an amazing work of collaborative art

You’ve got the good vibration

Sometimes we all need someone to stand by by us.