clock | June 30, 2007Early reviews of the movie are coming out. Definitely read Ezra Klein's take on it. And Amanda Marcotte's. Also Mark Hoofnagle. And why Rob does not want to see it.
Perhaps it is my upbringing, but the fact that one has to pay for medical treatment (and/or pay health insurance) was the second most appallingly surprising thing to me when I arrived in the USA (the sincere religiosity of so many natives was the first). After 16 years here, I still cannot really wrap my mind around it. The notion that anyone but doctors, nurses and patients can have a say in medical treatment, or that…
clock | June 30, 2007It's been a while since I last blogged about the Bosnian Pyramid (I did follow the story superficially, though, but was sick of trolls attracted to the topic), but I have to break the silence for this piece of good news:
The Culture Ministry found the "research" conducted by Osmanagic's team to be questionable and the collaborators of Osmanagic to lack the credibility needed to allow for continued funding of their "project." Also criticized by the Bosnian government, according to Javno, is the methods by which Osmanagic et al presented their findings, particularly the fact that they routinely…
clock | June 30, 2007
Lots of new papers just got published in PLoS-Genetics and PLoS-Computational Biology. Here are a couple of papers that caught my eye:
From Morphology to Neural Information: The Electric Sense of the Skate:
The electric sense appears in a variety of animals, from the shark to the platypus, and it facilitates short-range prey detection where environments limit sight. Typically, hundreds or thousands of sensors work in concert. In skates, rays, and sharks, each electrosensor includes a small, innervated bulb, with a thin, gel-filled canal leading to a surface pore. While experiments have…
clock | June 30, 2007First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changes One Species To Another:
Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI's Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism's genome with the other…
clock | June 29, 2007Modern Brains Have An Ancient Core:
Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body.
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-like ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Cell they…
clock | June 29, 2007Not that it costs anything to have one...
Yet, the Konsortium of science libraries in Serbia is seriously contemplating shutting down their KOBSON blog, an invaluable tool in science communication in the region.
Danica, who the regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with as she is the Number One Champion for Open Science and Web 2.0 science in Serbia, has put a lot of effort into building the online infrastructure for Serbian scientific communication, including the KOBSON blog and the KOBSON wiki, as well as teaching and preaching to the local scientific community about the…
clock | June 29, 2007It's always intriguing to know what the peer-reviewers have thought and written about a particular manuscript. Now, you can find out, at least in some cases, on PLoS-ONE papers. Chris Surridge explains.
clock | June 29, 2007I And The Bird #52 is up on The Wandering Tattler
Friday Ark #145 is up on the Modulator
clock | June 29, 2007July 1st through July 4th. Here are the detailed instructions how to participate.
clock | June 29, 2007The Newest Artificial Intelligence Computing Tool: People:
A USC Information Sciences Institute researcher thinks she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning. That tool, according to ISI computer scientist Kristina Lerman, is people, human intelligence at work on the social web, the network of blogs, bookmark, photo and video- sharing sites, and other meeting places now involving hundreds of thousands of individuals daily, recording observations and sharing opinions and information…
clock | June 28, 2007I have got to see this movie! Is it coming to the USA any time soon? Or Netflix?
Thanks Peggy...I won't be able to sleep tonight, scared of the bleating woolly terror!
clock | June 28, 2007You can now join the PLoS cause and the PLoS group if you want. If you are my friend, you can see all sorts of other groups and causes I have joined as well....
clock | June 28, 2007Sleep Apnea ED
Average Earthman
Deep Thoughts and Silliness
Three-Toed Sloth
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
The Vanity Website
The Indigestibele
clock | June 28, 2007Stem-Cell research is easier in some places than others.
Help us locate exactly where.
When is the North Carolina/Triangle community going to try to push hard for state funding of stem-cell research? Or have I missed something?
clock | June 28, 2007My copy of the book just arrived in the mail. This answers my question of what to read in SF (at least until Harry Potter VII comes out...).
clock | June 28, 2007Philosophia Naturalis #11 - Powers of 11 - is up on Highly Allochthonous.
The first anniversary edition of The Change Of Shift is up on NursingLink.
Carnival of Space #9 is up on The Planetary Society Weblog