Von Carsten Volkery, London

Tausende Kinder wurden in Obhut der irischen Kirche geschlagen, gepeinigt, vergewaltigt – aber niemand will persönlich die Verantwortung dafür übernehmen. Jetzt suchen die Bischöfe auf einer Reise zum Vatikan den Neuanfang. Doch auch der Papst hat sich nicht als Aufklärer hervorgetan.

Es sind keine gewöhnlichen Pilger, die am kommenden Wochenende in den Flieger nach Rom steigen werden. Zwei dutzend Bischöfe, drei Erzbischöfe und ein Kardinal – die komplette Führung der katholischen Kirche Irlands muss zur Sonderbeichte in den Vatikan. Jeder Bischof soll sieben Minuten mit Benedikt XVI. unter vier Augen bekommen. Hoffnungsvoll heißt es auf der Insel, der Papst wolle “zuhören, um zu helfen”.

Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature.”

~ Leonidas Moustakas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull’s-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away, the inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 and approximately 11 billion light-years.

The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of Californi, Santa Barbara. Treu says the odds of seeing such a special alignment are so small that they “hit the jackpot” with this discovery. “When I first saw it I said ‘wow, this is insane!’ I could not believe it!”

But this sight is more than just an incredible novelty. It’s also a very rare phenomenon that can offer insights into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and the curvature of the Universe itself. The discovery is part of the ongoing Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS) program.

The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are perfectly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an “Einstein ring”, around the foreground galaxy. If another more distant galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear.

“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature. Dark matter is not hidden to lensing,” added Leonidas Moustakas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasaden, California, USA. “The elegance of this lens is trumped only by the secrets of nature that it reveals.”

The dark matter distribution in the foreground galaxies that is warping space to create the Einstein’s telescope, the gravitational lens, can be accurately mapped. In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses. The team reports that this is the first measurement of the mass of a dwarf galaxy at cosmological distance.

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Heute mal eine kleine Geschichtsstunde über die blutigen Anfänge des Christentums. Sie ist mit vielen bunten und vielsagenden Bildern illustriert. (Audio ist ein Auszug aus der P.M. History Reihe …

Erste personelle Konsequenzen im Skandal um sexuellen Missbrauch an Jesuiten-Schulen: Der Rektor des Bonner Aloisius-Kollegs hat sein Amt mit sofortiger Wirkung niedergelegt. Dies halte er im Interesse einer lückenlosen Aufklärung für angeraten.

Bonn/München – Der Skandal um sexuellen Missbrauch an Jesuiten-Schulen in Deutschland hat erste personelle Konsequenzen: Der Rektor des Bonner Aloisius-Kollegs, Pater Theo Schneider, trat am Montag mit sofortiger Wirkung zurück. Das teilte die Deutsche Provinz der Jesuiten am Abend in München mit.

Dario Floreano^1*, Laurent Keller^2*

1 Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, 2 Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Biophore, Lausanne, Switzerland

Ever since Cicero’s De Natura Deorum ii.34., humans have been intrigued by the origin and mechanisms underlying complexity in nature. Darwin suggested that adaptation and complexity could evolve by natural selection acting successively on numerous small, heritable modifications. But is this enough? Here, we describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

Genes do not specify behaviours directly but rather encode molecular products that lead to the development of brains and bodies through which behaviour is expressed. An important task is therefore to understand how adaptive behaviours can evolve by the mere process of natural selection acting on genes that do not directly code for behaviours. A spectacular demonstration of the power of natural selection comes from experiments in the field of evolutionary robotics [1],[2], where scientists have conducted experimental evolution with robots. Evolutionary robotics has also been advocated as a method to automatically generate control systems that are comparatively simpler or more efficient than those engineered with other design methods because the space of solutions explored by evolution can be larger and less constrained than that explored by conventional engineering methods [3]. In this essay we will examine key experiments that illustrate how, for example, robots whose genes are translated into simple neural networks can evolve the ability to navigate, escape predators, coadapt brains and body morphologies, and cooperate. We present mostly—but not only—experimental results performed in our laboratory, which satisfy the following criteria. First, the experiments were at least partly carried out with real robots, allowing us to present a video showing the behaviours of the evolved robots. Second, the robot’s neural networks had a simple architecture with no synaptic plasticity, no ontogenetic development, and no detailed modelling of ion channels and spike transmission. Third, the genomes were directly mapped into the neural network (i.e., no gene-to-gene interaction, time-dependent dynamics, or ontogenetic plasticity). By limiting our analysis to these studies we are able to highlight the strength of the process of Darwinian selection in comparable simple systems exposed to different environmental conditions. There have been numerous other studies of experimental evolution performed with computer simulations of behavioural systems. Reviews of these studies can be found in [4]–[6]. Furthermore, artificial evolution has also been applied to disembodied digital organisms living in computer ecosystems, such as Tierra [7] and Avida [8], to address questions related to gene interactions [9], evolution of complexity [10], and mutation

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Schuldeingeständnisse in Hannover, Gedenken an Jesuiten-Opfer in Berlin: Hochrangige Geistliche der katholischen Kirche haben mit deutlichen Worten auf die Kindesmissbrauchsvorwürfe reagiert. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen sind Bistümer in ganz Deutschland betroffen.

Hannover – Mit einem beispiellosen Schuldeingeständnis hat die katholische Kirche in Hannover auf den Missbrauchsskandal durch Geistliche reagiert. “Die ganze Institution hat Schuld, weil sie für eine Mentalität gesorgt hat ‘Bitte nicht darüber reden’”, sagte Regionaldechant Propst Martin Tenge im Sonntagsgottesdienst in der Basilika in Hannover. Wenn ein katholischer Priester, der eine Institution mit so hohen Moralvorstellungen vertrete, sexuellen Missbrauch begehe, führe dies zu einem nicht mehr heilbaren Bruch. “Es gilt, sich zutiefst bei den Opfern zu entschuldigen.”

Im Skandal um die Missbrauchsfälle an Jesuitenschulen hat Pater Eberhard von Gemmingen eine gefährliche Analogie bemüht: Der frühere Leiter der deutschsprachigen Redaktion von Radio Vatikan verglich die Situation des Ordens mit der von Juden zur NS-Zeit – und ging noch weiter.

Heilbronn/München – Im Missbrauchsskandal an Jesuiten-Schulen hat Pater Eberhard von Gemmingen mit einem Verweis auf die Judenverfolgung vor einem Generalverdacht gegen seinen Orden gewarnt – und dabei eine gefährliche Analogie bemüht.

No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs as that seen in this deepest images of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (see video below). The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that correspond to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.