Parents who worry that video games are teaching kids to settle conflicts with blasters and bloodshed can take heart: A new generation of video games wants to save the world through peace and democracy.

A team at Carnegie Mellon University is working on an educational computer game that explores the Mideast conflict -- you win by negotiating peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This spring, the United Nations' World Food Programme released an online game in which players must figure out how to feed thousands of people on a fictitious island.

This weekend, the University of Southern California is kicking off a competition to develop a game that promotes international goodwill toward the United States, a kind of Voice of America for the gamer set.

And lest anyone think only professors and policy wonks are involved, a unit of MTV this week announced a contest to come up with a video game that fights genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Internet-based computer games, in which players create characters in a virtual world and interact to solve problems or win battles, are branching out from fantasy into serious social issues. Academics recognize their power as a new form of mass entertainment, and activists hope to tap into their enormous worldwide popularity to reach a new generation used to interacting through computers.

If cosmologists were to make a movie of the universe's entire history, the show would start, of course, with the scorching blast of the Big Bang. The universe—absolutely every bit of mass we can detect or even infer today—would expand at unfathomable speeds, going from smaller than a proton to larger than a galaxy in the blink of an eye. As the expansion continued, the universe would cool down, and by the time the opening credits of the movie finished scrolling, a superhot soup of elementary particles would fill the whole cosmos, ready to cook the first protons and neutrons.But what would happen next?

The fact is, cosmologists are still working out the rest of the plot—what exactly took place during the more than 13 billion years since that primeval blast. For this article, in keeping with the current trend in international scientific publishing, IEEE Spectrum uses the words \"billion\" to mean 109 and \"trillion\" to mean 1012. A particular piece of the story that has kept researchers scratching their heads is how galaxies formed and evolved. How did that amorphous particle soup transform itself into billions and billions of galaxies of breathtakingly different shapes and sizes? Why did these galaxies gather together in clusters, and clusters of clusters, embedded along unimaginably enormous structures of matter shaped like bubbles, filaments, and sheets?

To answer these and other fundamental questions in cosmology, an international group of scientists from Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States has been working on an ambitious project whose goal is to simulate on a supercomputer the evolution of the entire universe, from just after the Big Bang until the present.

The group, dubbed the Virgo Consortium—a name borrowed from the galaxy cluster closest to our own—is creating the largest and most detailed computer model of the universe ever made. While other groups have simulated chunks of the cosmos, the Virgo simulation is going for the whole thing. The cosmologists' best theories about the universe's matter distribution and galaxy formation will become equations, numbers, variables, and other parameters in simulations running on one of Germany's most powerful supercomputers, an IBM Unix cluster at the Max Planck Society's Computing Center in Garching, near Munich.

Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support, mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation, also using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support, hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details.

ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. It is fully featured, stable, mature and platform independent with an easy to use C/C++ API. It has advanced joint types and integrated collision detection with friction. ODE is useful for simulating vehicles, objects in virtual reality environments and virtual creatures. It is currently used in many computer games, 3D authoring tools and simulation tools.

Russell Smith is the primary author of ODE.

Researchers from UB's Virtual Reality Lab have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

"This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures," says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Games aren't just child's play anymore. Advances in computer graphics and communications have given rise to a growing market for "serious games" — nonentertainment applications developed by public-policy advocates, educators, corporate management, the health care industry and nonprofit foundations.

Applications draw on realistic game-based simulation to deliver educational programs, military training and tools for health maintenance and therapy.

E-Cell Project is an international research project aiming at developing necessary theoretical supports, technologies and software platforms to allow precise whole cell simulation.

E-Cell System is an object-oriented software suite for modeling, simulation, and analysis of large scale complex systems such as biological cells, architected by Kouichi Takahashi and written by a wonderful team of developers. Core part of the system, E-Cell Simulation Environment version 3, allows many components driven by multiple algorithms with different timescales to coexist.

From theories of pedestrian movement and traffic flow to voting processes, economic markets and war, researchers are striving towards a physics of society

"It may be", said US sociologist George Lundberg in 1939, "that the next great developments in the social sciences will come not from professed social scientists, but from people trained in other fields." Take a look at any issue of a physical-sciences journal in the past five years and you will see one such field staking its claim vigorously. Physics is muscling its way into social science. Not content with explaining the behaviour of atoms and electrons, semiconductors, sand and space-time, physicists are now setting out to understand the behaviour of people.

Penn State researchers have developed new software that can help decision-making teams in combat situations or homeland security handle information overload by inferring teams' information needs and delivering relevant data from computer-generated reports.
The agent software called CAST (Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork) highlights relevant data. This helps improve a team's decision-making process as well as enhances members' collaboration.

Vensim is used for developing, analyzing, and packaging high quality dynamic feedback models. Models are constructed graphically or in a text editor. Features include dynamic functions, subscripting (arrays), Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis, optimization, data handling, application interfaces, and much more. Ventana Systems also provides the Molecules software, for constructing system dynamics models from "chunks" or molecules of system dynamics structure.

The stochastic behavior of real-world systems is often difficult to understand or predict. Sometimes it is possible rigorously to demonstrate statistical properties of systems--e.g. average, worst-case, and best-case performance features. But at other times situations like resource contentions, deadlocks, race conditions, and other pitfalls of concrete designs only become evident when you actually run (or simulate) a system. SimPy is a Python package that allows you very easily to create models of discrete event systems.