That's the name of a new campaign launched by an interfaith coalition of religious groups that wants to bring high-speed Internet access to poor and rural communities that still don't have it. They see broadband communication as a "fundamental right," and they're now collecting signatures for a letter that will go to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.
The main message:

For too long, the process of reaching out and educating traditionally disenfranchised communities has been left to volunteer efforts and the philanthropic community alone. Increasing access doesn't just assist the people who are helped, we all benefit. Just as the value of a telephone increases when we can reach more people by using it, the value of the Internet for all of us increases when we are all connected. ...
As members of a wide range of faith communities in this country, we are prepared to do our part to help our friends and neighbors to get online and to get broadband access. We hope the federal government will also step up to the plate.

Check out Live Happy, a positive psychology iPhone application developed by Signal Patterns Labs (the same company that developed the Gratitude Stream iPhone app). The application is based on the research of Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of The How of Happiness. Grab the free version of the app or the paid version, which allows you to send Lyubomirsky questions.
Live Happy prompts users to perform activities (right on the iPhone) that research has shown help to boost happiness. These include things like taking a photo (to savor a moment), texting a thank-you message to a friend, or performing a random act of kindness.
Could these kinds of one-offs actually make people happier? "As a whole," says Lyubomirsky, "performing these activities adds up to a new mindset and a more positive way of engaging and viewing one's daily life."

The surviving pages of what’s believed to be the world’s oldest Bible have been published on the Web. And it's online for free.
Codex Sinaiticus, written in Greek by hand on parchment leaves, dates back to the middle of the fourth century. Pieces of the manuscript were found more than 150 years ago in a monastery on Mount Sinai, and have since been kept in Egypt, as well as at institutions in Britain, Russia, and Germany, where scholars worked to restore them.
Now, thanks to the British Library, the pages have been brought back together online (with translations in modern Greek and English) for all to see. There is a complete copy of the New Testament, a good portion of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, and early versions of other texts not found in the Bible today. The first half of the Old Testament—from Genesis to 1 Chronicles—was part of the original manuscript, experts say, but most of it is now missing and assumed to be lost for good. —Heather Wax

Meet Kobian, a walking robot that uses its face and body to imitate the way humans express a range of different emotions. The "humanoid," as it's being called, was unveiled yesterday by researchers at Waseda University in Japan.
To display these moods, motors move Kobian's lips, eyelids, eyebrows, arms, legs, and double-jointed neck. Check out some of the emotions (pictured top, left to right: sadness and delight; bottom, left to right: surprise and disgust):


















Keep in mind, however: Though Kobian can express feelings, the robot can't yet interact with people emotionally or intuitively. But it is a step in that direction. Robots that can show emotion, the developers believe, will be able to communicate more naturally with people. —Heather Wax

Stephen Prothero (@sprothero on Twitter), a Boston University religion professor, has summarized eight major world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, and Yoruba—as well as atheism, in 140 characters or less.

Another study, this time from an international team of researchers, has found a strong link between playing violent video games and hurting others. But they also found something else: a strong correlation between playing video games that encourage positive social interactions and helping others outside of the game.
In one experiment, the researchers asked American college students to play a neutral video game, a violent game, or a game in which the characters help and support each other in nonviolent ways. Then the students had to assign puzzles to random partners, who would win money if they could solve them all.
Those who played the prosocial game were significantly more helpful than those who played the other games, assigning easier puzzles to their partners, while students who played the violent game were much more likely to assign the hardest puzzles. The researchers also found a link between playing prosocial video games and helpful behavior among kids in Singapore and Japan.
"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," reports University of Michigan social psychologist Brad Bushman, who worked on the study. "The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing." —Heather Wax

A group of researchers from the University of Granada have used artificial technology to develop a software program that tries to imitate human creativity. The Intelligent Multiagent Music System, shortened to Inmamusys, composes original music on its own, which could be a better alternative to the repetitive canned music that now gets played in public places like hospitals, the researcher say. The details are complicated, but the idea behind Inmamusys, they say, was to create a system that automatically creates music that has "the correct degree of emotiveness (in order to manage the environment created) and originality (guaranteeing that the tunes composed are not repeated, and are original and endless)."
Creating music "is usually something done by human beings, although they do not understand how they do it," says Miguel Molina-Solana, a member of the research team. "In reality, there are numerous processes involved in the creation of music and, unfortunately, we still do not understand many of them. Others are so complex that we cannot analyze them, despite the enormous power of current computing tools. ... One of the most difficult facets of all to reproduce is creativity." —Heather Wax

A group of German Protestants have summarized the entire Bible on Twitter. Theologians divided up the text into 3,906 sections and more than 3,000 people turned the verses into tweets (mini blogs of no more than 140 characters). All of the tweets were the posted in order on a Web site and will be published as a book for the Frankfurt book fair in October.
As Melanie Huber, manager of initiative's Web site, explains:

We want with this action to encourage a debate about the Bible and to simultaneously show the modern possibilities that exist to receive and make known the word of God.

No real surprise here: People are better at lying online than in the real world, according to new research by Michael Woodworth, a forensic psychologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan who studies digital deception. “When people are interacting face to face, there is something called the ‘motivational impairment effect,’ where your body will give off some cues as you become more nervous and there’s more at stake with your lie,” he says. “In a computer-mediated environment, the exact opposite occurs.”
In other words, you're more likely to be caught lying in the real world because—unlike in a text message or email—nonverbal cues can give you away. The pitch of your voice changes or you make certain facial expressions.
“On average," says Woodworth, "people tell one to two lies a day, and these lies range from the trivial to the more serious." Learning how to better detect deceit online, he says, "will certainly have important implications in organizational contexts, both legal and illegal, in the political domain, and in family life as more and more children go online.” —Heather Wax

This is neat: The UCLA Experiential Technologies Center has built a virtual 3-D model of Karnak, the huge 4,000-year-old religious complex near Luxor, Egypt.
Generation after generation, pharaohs put their stamp on the site by installing—or removing—chapels, sphinxes, obelisks, and other sacred structures. Now, using Digital Karnak, you can see how the site looked at any point in its history and visualize how it changed from a two-acre temple to a 69-acre complex (with eight temples, 10 chapels, 100 sphinxes, and more) over a span of about 1,500 years. —Heather Wax

Watching a favorite TV show—and forming illusory relationships with the characters in it—can give us a sense of belonging, according to psychologists at the University at Buffalo and Miami University in Ohio. They found evidence of what's called the "social surrogacy hypothesis," the idea that we can use technology—like TV, music, and video games—to "provide the experience of belonging when no real belongingness has been experienced," explains Shira Gabriel, a UB professor of psychology who worked on the study.
The findings show that we tend to tune in to our favorite TV shows when we feel lonely, and we feel less lonely when we watch these shows. But the effect occurs only with programs we really immerse ourselves in and follow week after week, getting to know and care about the characters. Thinking about these programs protects us from drops in self-esteem, bad moods, and feelings of rejection.
"Turning one's back on family and friends for the solace of television may be maladaptive and leave a person with fewer resources over time," says UB psychologist Jaye Derrick, who also worked on the study, "but for those who have difficulty experiencing social interaction because of physical or environmental constraints, technologically induced belongingness may offer comfort." —Heather Wax

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new cell phone application that lets Muslims know when it's time for one of their five daily prayers. It's called Sun Dial, and unlike other commercial "call to prayer" applications, it uses images and audio rather than text.
On the screen, the sun moves through the sky toward green circles, each representing a prayer time. When the sun and a circle overlap, it's time to pray.
"Users drove this choice by telling us that tracking the sun was the most religiously valued method to determine prayer times,” says Susan Wyche, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech who studies how religious groups adopt and use technology. In a focus group, many Muslims said that things like smog, bad weather, tall buildings, and working in windowless rooms often restrict their view of the real sun.
Another interesting finding: Testing showed that “Sun Dial provided more than functionality or a prompt to the prayer times; it also contributed to users’ religious experience by reminding them they were part of a larger community," according to Wyche.
The researchers are now working to make the application available for download on the Internet. —Heather Wax

After 20 years of research and work, Conrad Rudolph, a professor of medieval art history at the University of California, Riverside, has finished a digital reconstruction of "The Mystic Ark," a mural painted by 12th-century theologian Hugh of Saint Victor. The mural, probably painted on a cloister wall, was likely used by Hugh to teach his most promising students his conception of the history of salvation.
Using a variety of computer-based programs and a 42-page description written by one of these pupils—all that remains of the original work—Rudolph was able to combine designs and pieces from similar works of the time to create a close approximation of the mural. Among the symbols used in the painting are zodiac signs, a map of the world during the Exodus, and the image of Jesus flanked by angels. The mural is said to depict all time, all space, all matter, all of human history, all of human learning, and all of human spiritual endeavor from the beginning of time until the Last Judgment.
“Hugh painted this as the basis of an advanced seminar that dealt with religious issues of a politically sensitive nature,” Rudolph says. “This was that moment in Western culture when secular learning was just beginning to be taken up for its own sake rather than necessarily being directed specifically toward salvation and the study of the Bible.”
A life-size version of the re-created mural, standing 13 feet by 15 feet, will be displayed throughout the month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. —Stephen Mapes

Religious values significantly influence whether or not people think nanotechnology is morally acceptable and how useful they think it is for society, according to survey results published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. More specifically, a country's general opinion on the morality of nanotechnology correlates directly with the aggregate level of religious views in that country. (Click on image for larger view.)
"The level of 'religiosity' in a particular country is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not people see nanotechnology as morally acceptable," says Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and lead author of the study. In the United States and European countries in which religion plays a large role in everyday life (Italy, Austria, Ireland), the use of nanotechnology in synthetic biology is generally perceived as immoral, while in more secular countries like Germany and France, people are much less likely to feel the same way.
Back in February, Scheufele and his colleague Elizabeth Corley of Arizona State University released results that showed only 29.5 percent of the 1,015 American adults sampled in their survey said they think the applications of nanotechnology are morally acceptable. This rejection, Scheufele said, seems to comes from the country's strong religious history rather than a lack of knowledge regarding the technology; many with strong religious convictions were well-informed on the subject, he found, but still considered nanotechnology, along with biotechnology and stem cell research, as a way for researchers to "play God."
Scheufele says there "is absolutely no change in what people know about nanotechnology between 2004 and 2007"—possibly in part because people who already hold strong views regarding the technology are not necessarily seeking factual information about it. Overall, he says, the findings show that religiosity serves as a tool for interpreting new technologies—and when people filter their views through religion, it often leads toward broader negative public attitudes toward science. "What we captured is nanospecific, but it is also representative of a larger attitude toward science and technology,"he says. "It raises a big question: What's really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?"
The study, Scheufele writes on his blog, "highlights the importance of values, beliefs, and confirms findings from a number of recent studies (Brossard, Scheufele, Kim, & Lewenstein, forthcoming; Ho, Brossard, & Scheufele, 2008; Kahan, 2008; Nisbet, 2005) that all examine how values shape the interpretation of scientific information. This research shows that the exact same information can translate into very different attitudinal conclusions for highly religious respondents than for nonreligious ones. In other words, we may be wasting valuable time and resources by focusing our efforts on putting more and more information in front of an unaware public, without first developing a better understanding of how different groups will filter or reinterpret this information when it reaches them, given their personal value systems and beliefs." —Heather Wax

During the last few years, there's been a good amount of ethical debate over the fairness of Web sites like MatchingDonors, which match living organ donors with patients who need organ transplants. Functioning much like online dating sites, these Web sites bypass the objective mathematical formula that allocates organs from deceased donors to those who need them most and instead allows patients to solicit living donors—often called "Good Samaritan" donors—through personal appeals posted online. As a result, some ethicists worry that a donor's decision to give an organ to a specific person may be based more on the strength of a certain appeal and less on information relevant to the outcome of the transplant. And they worry that when donors get to choose who they give an organ to, they're also, in a sense, able to decide who lives or dies based on particular preferences, including race or religion.
In a new study published in Clinical Transplantation, researchers looked at the profiles of patients soliciting living kidney donors on the largest organ matching Web site in the United States. They found that the proportion of patients who are white and employed is higher than among the general population of those waiting for organs. They also found that other than listing their blood type, the region where they live, and their gender, patients provided surprisingly few socio-demographic and medical details in their profiles. The assumption is that patients may omit certain personal and medical characteristics in their profiles for a variety of reasons—maybe they don't think their marital status is relevant or they worry that their age or race will contribute to bias or discrimination. "It is not surprising that patients will present themselves in the most favorable light while omitting characteristics that they perceive as undesirable, as to do otherwise might reduce their success in attracting a suitable living donor," says psychologist James Rodrigue, co-author of the study. "However, the transplant community has worked diligently for years to ensure that social worth and bias are removed or otherwise minimized from patient selection decisions, yet we passively accept such social worth judgments by Good Samaritan donors in the context of public solicitation."
While the online system does not violate existing national policies with regard to organ donation, many are concerned that organ matching Web sites favor those who have greater education and wealth. And in a 2003 telephone survey conducted by Transplantation magazine, two-thirds of respondents said that didn't like the idea of anonymous kidney donors directing their organs to a member of a specific religious or racial group, or to a specific person with whom the donors have no prior emotional connection. —Heather Wax

Last night, I watched a live Web cast of the traditional Kol Nidre service that marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement in Judaism. It was the second year that the Jewish Television Network has broadcast an online version of the prayer service, even though some rabbis feel Jewish worship is a communal act that is meant to be experienced surrounded by others in a synagogue.
But the online service, this year led by Rabbi Naomi Levy (who has appeared on Oprah), is designed to attract Jews who aren't affiliated with a synagogue, are unable to leave their homes, or may have become disconnected from the faith. In 2004, Levy founded Nashuva, a Jewish community of prayer and action in Brentwood, California, which wants to reach out to unaffiliated Jews; it doesn't have dues, membership, or even a building (services are held at Brentwood Presbyterian Church, and the two congregations work together on interfaith projects), and the community is committed to social action, critical thinking, learning, and dialogue. It was expected that about 50,000 people would watch Nashuva's prayer service online.
"With the Kol Nidre service, we recognized that it's an opportunity to democratize Jewish life," Jay Sanderson, CEO of JTN Productions and JewishTVNetwork.com, told the Los Angeles Daily News. "This service is very universal and we want to get it out there to as many people as we can." —Heather Wax

A group of 25 European roboticists, developmental psychologists, and neuroscientists have been working together on the Feelix Growing project, trying to develop robots that are more in tune with human emotions and more intelligent and sensitive than ever before. The idea is to build perceptive and caring robots that will be able to learn when a person is happy, sad, or angry, so that they'll be better able to live alongside us. The learning is done through artificial neural networks, with cameras and sensors helping the robots to read facial expressions, tone of voice, and other things associated with different emotional states, and the scientists hope the technology will allow the robots to differentiate cries of pain, for instance, from those of happiness. The ultimate goal is that the robots will learn from experience how best to respond to these emotional cues and adapt their behavior accordingly. —Heather Wax

Check out the new online game Epsilon, created by the code-monkey super geniuses at Dissolute Productions. Epsilon challenges players to solve some the universe's biggest puzzles —Are there extra dimensions? What is dark matter?—using fictional technologies discovered when particle physicists gathered data from experiments run with the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. As a "test participant" at Epsilon Experimental Sciences Research Facility, the gamer uses mini black holes, time travel, gravitational shifts, and wormholes to try to guide an orb through a maze to a portal.
The real LHC hasn't been fired up yet; that's set to happen this summer. The powerful particle accelerator—with a circumference the length of 300 football fields and buried deep beneath the earth on the outskirts of Geneva—will smash protons into each other at speeds near that of light and in conditions colder than space. Data collected from the LHC will help scientists re-create what happened a fraction of a second after the big bang and potentially detect particles like the currently theoretical Higgs boson, or "God particle," which helps physicists explain how mass and matter came into existence. In other words, they're hoping the machine will unlock some of the secrets of the universe.
Though Epsilon is mostly about the puzzles and less about the physics, it's stated goal is to allow players to "discover the potential of this whole new world of science," and it certainly does that. —Julia C. Keller

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has bet Lotus software creator Mitchell Kapor 10,000 dollars that by 2029 we'll have a computer that can pass the Turing Test, according to The New York Times. In other words, we're only 20 years away from an "intelligent" computer that can converse so much like a human that the two will be indistinguishable.
Others, however, like Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, aren't sure we'll ever be able to build machines as smart as we are, given how haphazardly our brain circuitry evolved. “My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” the neuroscientist said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.” —Heather Wax

This week, Microsoft launched a free tool that lets you explore the universe from your computer. With WorldWide Telescope, you can zoom out to the whole sky or toward planets, soar through galaxies, and track the position of celestial objects from any location on Earth. The tool will compete with Google Sky, a virtual telescope unveiled last year, and we're already hearing that WorldWide Telescope takes the experience up a notch. —Heather Wax