Stuff going on with the world

Good morning.

 Though it's not morning here nor there.

I feel like a lot of cool (possibly quite big) things have been happening during the last week in the world. You seem really busy and tired and I assume you have no time to follow the news, so I figured I'd make a collection for you of the most important (well, the ones I find most interesting) ones from the last week.

164069 names
This is probably news only in Finland, but still. You know they've been collecting names to make equal marriage law happen in Finland. The time to collect names finished on Thursday, and the final number of names was 164069, 114069 more than it would have taken to get the parliament to start processing it to possibly make it happen. Of course that doesn't yet mean that the proposal will actually go through, because we have a bunch of people in the parliament who who see it as an accomplishment that they have prevented gay marriage to become legal on this term. But people are hopeful.

The pope
It was actually news to me that there is a new pope. The old  one had apparently died when I was in Australia and failed to hear about it.
Anyway, he had said some day last week, that the Catholic church has to get rid of its ridiculous obsession of thinking abortion, contraception and homosexuality are bad things. And it seems to me what the pope says the Catholics believe.

No methane on Mars
For a long time a bunch of scientists have figured that there is methane on Mars, which would indicate that there might be life, because organic life is the main source on methane at least here on Earth. Now Curiosity (which I still think is the most adorable name for a Mars rover) has analysed the atmosphere there and found no methane. Which sucks, because people were just getting excited that there might me life on Mars, and the lack of methane would indicate there isn't. It doesn't mean there isn't, but the chances just dropped a long way. So that's disappointing.

A kid with three parents
And I don't mean a kid who is taken care of by three people. Nor of uterus rental, which can be counted as having three biological parents. I'm talking about a kid having three genetic parents. There is two kinds of DNA in our system: the DNA in the nucleus and in the mitochondria of the cell. Sometimes there are some mitochondrial diseases that are passed on in the mitochondrial DNA, which very much sucks. Now scientists in Britain have figured out how to avoid passing the damaged mitochondrial DNA to own, genetic kids. Basically they take an egg cell from a healthy woman, remove the nucleus and insert the nucleus from an egg cell of the woman having trouble with the mitochondrial DNA. That means the kid will have mom's DNA, dad's DNA and another mom's mitochondrial DNA, three genetic parents.

Space and time and quantum physics that I don't understand
Some physicists figured out an easier way to make quantum physics calculations, before it was very very difficult, and now can be done using geometry and is very much easier. But it's still quantum physics, so...
Anyway, before the calculations were based on the assumption that the existence of space and time cause particles to interact but now, with the new ways of doing the calculations, it seems the interaction between particles is what causes the space and time to exist. I wish I understood this better.

Hmm... That was somewhat less stuff that I thought it'd be. On top of this there have been some terrorist attacks somewhere, but I think the things above are more interesting. There is always people attacking someone somewhere. Also I think there have been elections in Norway and Germany. (I'm starting to think my understanding of the phrase "big news" is somehow twisted...)

Facebook tells me it is international book week. Or maybe it was last week. Anyway, the point was everyone should take the closest book, page 52, and write out the fifth sentence. So I did that.
"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "We are going to die after all."

So that's something for you to think of for a week.

 ~matu