Science Journal Produces a Different Kind of Viral Video - Technology Review
4 days ago by tsuomela
The world's first peer-reviewed video journal gives scientists a better way to show others how to replicate experiments.
science
communication
professional
video
demonstration
biology
from delicious
4 days ago by tsuomela
Red Brains, Blue Brains: Republicans Are Stupid - The Stupid Premise Of A Stupid Book
24 days ago by tsuomela
Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
book
review
politics
beliefs
psychology
republicans
biology
ideology
from delicious
24 days ago by tsuomela
Social status and health: Misery index | The Economist
4 weeks ago by tsuomela
"In it, a group of researchers led by Jenny Tung and Yoav Gilad at the University of Chicago looked at the effects of status on rhesus macaques. Experience has shown that these monkeys display the simian equivalent of the Whitehall studies’ findings. The high risk of disease among those at the bottom of the heap in both cases suggests that biochemical responses to low status affect a creature’s immune system. Those responses must, in turn, depend on changes in the way the creatures’ genes are expressed. To investigate this phenomenon means manipulating social hierarchies, but that would be hard (and probably unethical) if it were done to human beings. You can, however, do it to monkeys, and the researchers did."
biology
stress
status
genetics
social-status
from delicious
4 weeks ago by tsuomela
Nothing to Sneeze at: Allergies May Be Good for You: Scientific American
5 weeks ago by tsuomela
In a paper published April 26 in Nature, Medzhitov and his colleagues argue that allergies are triggered by potentially dangerous substances in the environment or food to protect us.
biology
allergies
science
parasites
from delicious
5 weeks ago by tsuomela
Allergies 101: Part the Third : We Beasties
6 weeks ago by tsuomela
"I know this post has been a long time coming. In the first part of this series, I told you that allergies are the result of an immune response against an external, but normally not harmful substance. In part 2, I told you that allergies are the result of a specific type of immune response called "Th2," which leads to the production of IgE antibodies, and that this immune response is thought to have evolved to combat infections caused by worms. But what makes your immune system think it's supposed to be battling a worm?"
biology
allergies
health
medicine
from delicious
6 weeks ago by tsuomela
An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress
9 weeks ago by tsuomela
"Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature TW, is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. TW never exceeds 31 °C. Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record. "
global-warming
climate-change
climate
biology
consequences
from delicious
9 weeks ago by tsuomela
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - Magazine - The Atlantic
february 2012 by tsuomela
"Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites."
biology
parasites
evolution
disease
psychology
psychopathology
brain
neuroscience
from delicious
february 2012 by tsuomela
Announcing Principles of Biology, an Interactive Textbook by Nature Education
january 2012 by tsuomela
Nature Education is delighted to announce the launch of a new series of affordable, high quality interactive textbooks in college-level science. The first textbook in the series, Principles of Biology, is intended for university-level biology courses. The first title in the series is Principles of Biology, intended for introductory biology classes.
education
publishing
interactive
biology
textbook
from delicious
january 2012 by tsuomela
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates « Gravity and Levity
january 2012 by tsuomela
"This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year."
biology
age
aging
science
statistics
explanation
health
death
longevity
mortality
from delicious
january 2012 by tsuomela
Infinite Stupidity | Conversation | Edge
january 2012 by tsuomela
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
evolution
learning
innovation
creativity
social-media
technology-effects
evolutionary-psychology
biology
imitation
epistemology
facebook
internet
from delicious
january 2012 by tsuomela
State of the Birds - 2011 Report — Public Lands and Waters
september 2011 by tsuomela
"This year’s report provides the nation’s first assessment of the distribution of birds on public lands and helps public agencies identify which species have significant potential for conservation in each habitat. The state of our birds is a measurable indicator of how well we are doing as stewards of our environment. The signal is clear. Greater conservation efforts on public lands and waters are needed to realize the vision of a nation sustained economically and spiritually by abundant natural resources and spectacular wildlife."
citizen-science
data
collaboration
ornithology
birds
environment
conservation
biology
science
september 2011 by tsuomela
Assessing citizen science data quality: an invasive species case study - Crall - Conservation Letters - Wiley Online Library
july 2011 by tsuomela
An increase in the number of citizen science programs has prompted an examination of their ability to provide data of sufficient quality. We tested the ability of volunteers relative to professionals in identifying invasive plant species, mapping their distributions, and estimating their abundance within plots. We generally found that volunteers perform almost as well as professionals in some areas, but that we should be cautious about data quality in both groups. We analyzed predictors of volunteer success (age, education, experience, science literacy, attitudes) in training-related skills, but these proved to be poor predictors of performance and could not be used as effective eligibility criteria. However, volunteer success with species identification increased with their self-identified comfort level. Based on our case study results, we offer lessons learned and their application to other programs and provide recommendations for future research in this area.
citizen-science
biology
ecology
data-collection
accuracy
research
july 2011 by tsuomela
Richard C. Francis' Epigenetics: How a new field has changed the way we think about genes. - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine
june 2011 by tsuomela
Though the genetic catalog is now largely complete, we still await many of the anticipated insights, and in Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance, Richard Francis, a writer with a biology Ph.D., traces the emergence of a different genetic paradigm. Our DNA shapes who we are, Francis reports from the research forefront, but it is far from a static plan or an inflexible oracle
book
review
genetics
biology
evolution
june 2011 by tsuomela
Sleep on it | The Scientist
june 2011 by tsuomela
To determine what effects sleep had on the flies, the team designed experiments to test two reigning theories: synaptic homeostasis, the idea that neuronal connections increase during wakefulness but are downscaled during sleep, pruning synapses created during the day so only the strongest connections remain intact
sleep
biology
science
experiments
june 2011 by tsuomela
Churchland, P.S.: Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.
may 2011 by tsuomela
"What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality"
book
publisher
philosophy
neurology
biology
ethics
morality
may 2011 by tsuomela
Species : John S. Wilkins - University of California Press
april 2011 by tsuomela
"The complex idea of “species” has evolved over time, yet its meaning is far from resolved. This comprehensive work takes a fresh look at an idea central to the field of biology by tracing its history from antiquity to today. John S. Wilkins explores the essentialist view, a staple of logic from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages to fairly recent times, and considers the idea of species in natural history—a concept often connected to reproduction. Tracing “generative conceptions” of species back through Darwin to Epicurus, Wilkins provides a new perspective on the relationship between philosophical and biological approaches to this concept. He also reviews the array of current definitions. Species is a benchmark exploration and clarification of a concept fundamental to the past, present, and future of the natural sciences."
book
publisher
evolution
biology
species
concepts
history
philosophy
april 2011 by tsuomela
Daniel Nettle's personal page
april 2011 by tsuomela
Author of Personality:what makes you the way you are... "I am a behavioural scientist interested in applying ideas from ecology and evolution to human behaviour. I have worked on such topics as cooperation, reproductive decisions, parenting and families, personality, and health. My research uses theoretical modelling, as well as behavioural data from several countries, especially the UK. I"
people
evolution
biology
behavior
human
modeling
psychology
april 2011 by tsuomela
Testing Anthropic Selection: A Climate Change Example - Astrobiology
april 2011 by tsuomela
"Planetary anthropic selection, the idea that Earth has unusual properties since, otherwise, we would not be here to observe it, is a controversial idea. This paper proposes a methodology by which to test anthropic proposals by comparison of Earth to synthetic populations of Earth-like planets. The paper illustrates this approach by investigating possible anthropic selection for high (or low) rates of Milankovitch-driven climate change. Three separate tests are investigated: (1) Earth-Moon properties and their effect on obliquity
astrobiology
astronomy
planetary
anthropic-principle
life
biology
climate
april 2011 by tsuomela
The New Atlantis » The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings
april 2011 by tsuomela
Here, then, is my question: Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.
biology
explanation
metaphor
machine
science
philosophy
april 2011 by tsuomela
Forest Research - Anna Lawrence
april 2011 by tsuomela
Author of "The first cuckoo in winter: British phenology recording, credibility and meaning"
people
research
citizen-science
forestry
environment
monitor
citizen
participation
phenology
biology
diversity
country(UK)
april 2011 by tsuomela
Long-Neglected Experiment Gives New Clues to Origin of Life - ScienceNOW
march 2011 by tsuomela
Reports on reanalysis of 1950s classic Stanley Miller experiments that created amino acids in early Earth gas environments.
life
biology
exobiology
planetary
geology
paleontology
history
earth
earth-science
march 2011 by tsuomela
UnderstandingSociety: Social brains
march 2011 by tsuomela
"It seems to me that there is a sturdy intermediate position that incorporates some of both extremes and does a superior job of capturing the truth about human behavior and mind than either. Certainly human cognitive and behavioral capacities have an evolutionary history. But equally, it is plausible that there is a great deal of plasticity and multiple-realizability that has been built into these systems -- with the result that there is no one-to-one relationship between biological origins and current behavioral patterns. Culture is a powerful intervening structure. "
biology
evolution
evolutionary-psychology
social
structure
nature-v-nurture
march 2011 by tsuomela
Sperm Whales May Have Names | Wired Science | Wired.com
march 2011 by tsuomela
"Subtle variations in sperm-whale calls suggest that individuals announce themselves with discrete personal identifier. To put it another way, they might have names."
biology
oceans
whales
communication
animals
march 2011 by tsuomela
PLoS ONE: The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception
march 2011 by tsuomela
"Most of us are poor at faking actions. Kinematic studies have shown that when pretending to pick up imagined objects (pantomimed actions), we move and shape our hands quite differently from when grasping real ones. These differences between real and pantomimed actions have been linked to separate brain pathways specialized for different kinds of visuomotor guidance. Yet professional magicians regularly use pantomimed actions to deceive audiences."
magic
research
biology
neurology
expertise
magician
movement
body
march 2011 by tsuomela
The Avengers Help You Understand Your Fears About Transhumanism | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine
march 2011 by tsuomela
"Transhumanism is a big, complicated, sprawling idea. The central concept – that humans can be made better with technology – touches on a lot of hopes and fears about the future of humanity. Though I’m always going on about how great human enhancement could be, I’ve got my fair share of fears myself. But my fears are probably way different than many of your fears. But how in the world can we represent those concerns? As it turns out, I’ve found a pretty good set of archetypes that represent our hopes and fears: Marvel Comic’s Avengers."
transhumanism
future
biology
psychology
change
metaphor
comics
march 2011 by tsuomela
Humans, Version 3.0 § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
march 2011 by tsuomela
Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended—i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.
future
evolution
adaptation
neurology
biology
culture
music
language
human-enhancement
march 2011 by tsuomela
F1000 - Post publication peer review
february 2011 by tsuomela
The core service of Faculty of 1000 (F1000) identifies and evaluates the most important articles in biology and medical research publications. The selection process comprises a peer-nominated global 'Faculty' of the world's leading scientists and clinicians who rate the best of the articles they read and explain their importance.Launched in 2002, F1000 was conceived as a collaboration of 1000 international Faculty Members. Although the name stuck, the remit of our service continues to grow and the Faculty now numbers more than 10,000 experts whose evaluations form a fully searchable resource identifying the best research available. Faculty Members and their evaluations are organized into over 40 Faculties (subjects), which are further subdivided into over 300 Sections.
science
biology
bioscience
peer-review
summary
february 2011 by tsuomela
Penn State Live - High school biology teachers reluctant to endorse evolution in class
february 2011 by tsuomela
"The majority of public high school biology teachers are not strong classroom advocates of evolutionary biology, despite 40 years of court cases that have ruled teaching creationism or intelligent design violates the Constitution, according to Penn State political scientists."
education
evolution
creationism
intelligent-design
high-school
biology
february 2011 by tsuomela
Biologists Ignoring Low-Hanging Fruit, Says Drug Discovery Study - Technology Review
february 2011 by tsuomela
"In many cases, these tools are not available. And when that happens, the proteins are ignored. This, say Isserlin and co, is one of the important underlying reasons why so many kinases and other interesting biomolecules are so poorly studied.
The solution then is clear: provide incentive for chemists to develop these tools."
biology
genetics
innovation
powerlaw
The solution then is clear: provide incentive for chemists to develop these tools."
february 2011 by tsuomela
Svalbard Global Seed Vault - regjeringen.no
january 2011 by tsuomela
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the globe. Many of these collections are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.
biology
global
archive
vault
storage
biodiversity
environment
science
country(Norway)
january 2011 by tsuomela
Dryad data file: Dryad Home
january 2011 by tsuomela
Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository.
science
data
sharing
open-science
repository
biology
bioscience
january 2011 by tsuomela
Strange Horizons Columns: Ten Years of Sexing the Body, by Matthew Cheney
january 2011 by tsuomela
Dialog on evolutionary psychology just-so-stories and gender.
gender
sex
criticism
evolutionary-psychology
determinism
biology
january 2011 by tsuomela
A Mind in the Water | Orion Magazine
january 2011 by tsuomela
On the legacy of John C. Lilly and his dolphin experiments.
"This strange rupture effectively established the curious double legacy of the modern bottlenose: the flower children all learned that Tursiops truncatus was an erotically liberated, spiritually profound pacifist, intent on saving humans from their materialistic, violent, and repressive lives
science
history
biology
1960s
psychology
animals
communication
dolphin
oceanography
"This strange rupture effectively established the curious double legacy of the modern bottlenose: the flower children all learned that Tursiops truncatus was an erotically liberated, spiritually profound pacifist, intent on saving humans from their materialistic, violent, and repressive lives
january 2011 by tsuomela
[0810.4168] The transmission sense of information
january 2011 by tsuomela
"Here we propose an alternative to the causal and semantic senses of information: a transmission sense of information, in which an object X conveys information if the function of X is to reduce, by virtue of its sequence properties, uncertainty on the part of an agent who observes X. The transmission sense not only captures much of what biologists intend when they talk about information in genes, but also brings Shannon's theory back to the fore. By taking the viewpoint of a communications engineer and focusing on the decision problem of how information is to be packaged for transport, this approach resolves several problems that have plagued the information concept in biology, and highlights a number of important features of the way that information is encoded, stored, and transmitted as genetic sequence."
information
information-science
philosophy
biology
january 2011 by tsuomela
Free will is not an illusion | spiked
november 2010 by tsuomela
Neuro-determinism, though seemingly self-evident, is also wrong.
The first line of attack is to remove the hype from the neuroscience of consciousness and remind ourselves how little we know. We understand even less. There is at present no adequate theory of qualia (the actual experience of things – such as the sensation of yellow, the feeling of warmth, the taste of wine);...
...
Secondly, we should question the focus on the stand-alone brain. The world we live in is not one of sparks of isolated sentience cast amid a rubble of material objects. We live in a world that is collectively constructed.
biology
neurology
determinism
philosophy
mind
mind-body
The first line of attack is to remove the hype from the neuroscience of consciousness and remind ourselves how little we know. We understand even less. There is at present no adequate theory of qualia (the actual experience of things – such as the sensation of yellow, the feeling of warmth, the taste of wine);...
...
Secondly, we should question the focus on the stand-alone brain. The world we live in is not one of sparks of isolated sentience cast amid a rubble of material objects. We live in a world that is collectively constructed.
november 2010 by tsuomela
Harvard Case Against Marc Hauser Is Hard to Define - NYTimes.com
october 2010 by tsuomela
"Disagreements over the appropriate method are quite common in the animal cognition field, as is evident in the fact that some of the most spectacular experiments cannot be repeated. Disagreements over method also seem to have been involved in at least some of the five cases involving differences between Dr. Hauser and his students."
science
ethics
fraud
repetition
positivism
philosophy
methodology
experiments
expertise
animal-behavior
cognition
biology
october 2010 by tsuomela
DIYbio | An Institution for the Amateur Biologist
october 2010 by tsuomela
DIYbio.org is an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.
citizen-science
biology
diy
science
genetics
cooperative
startup
hacking
october 2010 by tsuomela
Birding News and Features — eBird
october 2010 by tsuomela
A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.
citizen-science
birds
science
nature
environment
participation
biology
school(Cornell)
october 2010 by tsuomela
Join The Hunt for Bees! | The Great Sunflower Project
october 2010 by tsuomela
In 2008, we started this project as a way to gather information about our urban, suburban and rural bee populations. We wanted to enlist people all over the US and Canada to observe their bees and be citizen scientists. We asked them to plant sunflowers in their gardens so we could standardize study of bee activity and provide more resources for bees. Sunflowers are relatively easy to grow and are wildly attactive to bees.
citizen-science
biology
bees
science
online
projects
ecology
nature
october 2010 by tsuomela
Symbiota : HomePage
september 2010 by tsuomela
In this quickly changing world, there has developed a great necessity to learn about our world-wide biota at an increased rate. Scientists are predicting that future species declines will approach historical mass extinction levels within this century. We need to develop better tools to aid taxonomists, field biologists, and environmental educators. It is imperative that we increase our rate of conducting biological inventories, especially within the tropics, as well as steering youth toward becoming our future scientists. Symbiota web tools strive to integrate biological community knowledge and data in order to synthesize a network of databases and tools that will aid in increasing our overall environmental comprehension.
biology
data
biodiversity
software
science
collaboration
development
september 2010 by tsuomela
Discover Life in America - All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory
september 2010 by tsuomela
Discover Life in America (DLIA) is the non-profit organization coordinating the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
biology
citizen-science
biodiversity
inventory
catalog
great-smoky-mountains
survey
september 2010 by tsuomela
Roald Dahl—the Storyteller As Benevolent Sadist -- New York Magazine
september 2010 by tsuomela
..Dahl’s adult fiction is fun but often formulaic. It sets up a premise, coldly follows the implied narrative logic, and nearly always ends with a twist. (OMG: The wife is missing her fingers!) There are no accidents or messiness or flights of inspiration.
Dahl’s kids’ stories, on the other hand, are full of characters who transcend narrative logic, e.g., the caterpillar in James and the Giant Peach, a loudmouth who’s always breaking into rude songs and forcing James to help him put on or take off his 42 boots. He does this not because it furthers the story, one senses, but because it’s funny, and because it’s exactly how this particular creature would act if he found himself flying around on a house-size piece of fruit. The keynote of Dahl’s children’s books is delight in wild invention—and delight, too, in the way that invention manages to braid the two opposed strands of his personality, the nasty and the charming, into something unique in the history of storytelling.
biology
writer
story-telling
children
author
book
review
Dahl’s kids’ stories, on the other hand, are full of characters who transcend narrative logic, e.g., the caterpillar in James and the Giant Peach, a loudmouth who’s always breaking into rude songs and forcing James to help him put on or take off his 42 boots. He does this not because it furthers the story, one senses, but because it’s funny, and because it’s exactly how this particular creature would act if he found himself flying around on a house-size piece of fruit. The keynote of Dahl’s children’s books is delight in wild invention—and delight, too, in the way that invention manages to braid the two opposed strands of his personality, the nasty and the charming, into something unique in the history of storytelling.
september 2010 by tsuomela
Lost in Transcription
september 2010 by tsuomela
Jon Wilkins
Jon is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies theoretical evolutionary biology. He is also a poet, and his book, Transistor Rodeo, was recently published by the University of Utah Press
weblog-individual
evolution
biology
complexity
via:cshalizi
Jon is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies theoretical evolutionary biology. He is also a poet, and his book, Transistor Rodeo, was recently published by the University of Utah Press
september 2010 by tsuomela
Altruism can be explained by natural selection : Nature News
august 2010 by tsuomela
A two-part mathematical analysis1, published in Nature this week, overturns this tenet by showing that it is possible for eusocial behaviour to evolve through standard natural-selection processes.
altruism
evolution
cooperation
biology
modeling
august 2010 by tsuomela
Data release, ethics, and professional survival. | Adventures in Ethics and Science
august 2010 by tsuomela
Discussion of data release requirements in genetics.
open-science
data
access
open-access
professional
rewards
incentives
biology
genetics
august 2010 by tsuomela
Human genome at ten: Science after the sequence : Nature News
june 2010 by tsuomela
Given ten years' of hindsight and the current set of obstacles, it's no surprise that researchers now state somewhat modest expectations for what human genomics can deliver and by when. The rationale for sequencing and exploring the human genome — to revolutionize the finding of new drugs, diagnostics and vaccines, and to tailor treatments to the genetic make-up of individuals — is the same today. But almost half of respondents now say that the benefits of the human genome were oversold in the lead up to 2000. "While I do feel that the gains made by the human genome project are extraordinary and affect my research significantly, I still feel that it was overhyped to the general population," read one typical response.
genetics
biology
technology
history
sts
data-management
june 2010 by tsuomela
Open Biology's Quest to Explode Data - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences
june 2010 by tsuomela
That’s because it’s difficult to start an “open” biology process from scratch. The cost of entry is still in the tens of millions of dollars to develop a meaningful corpus of data sets one can legally share and analytic tools one can legally place under open source licenses. Even then you’d have to find incentives to get scientists to share their new data, their models of disease, their software tools—when they’re not rewarded for doing so. It is a tall hill to climb.
open-science
biology
science
data-curation
project(Utenn)
june 2010 by tsuomela
The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies
may 2010 by tsuomela
The OBO Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. The groups developing ontologies who have expressed an interest in this goal are listed below, followed by other relevant efforts in this domain.
biology
database
development
ontology
metadata
science
open
semantic-web
bioinformatics
open-science
data-curation
project(Utenn)
may 2010 by tsuomela
Darwin's Literary Models
may 2010 by tsuomela
It may not be structured like a journal paper, but "On the Origin of Species" was written according to classical rules of rhetoric.
darwin
charles
logic
rhetoric
argument
style
writing
science
persuasion
19c
evolution
biology
communication
scholarly-communication
may 2010 by tsuomela
PLoS Computational Biology: Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions
may 2010 by tsuomela
Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a tragedy of the commons (such as over-fishing or the destruction of our environment). This contribution addresses a number of related puzzles of human behavior with an evolutionary game theoretical approach as it has been successfully used to explain the behavior of other biological species many times, from bacteria to vertebrates. Our agent-based model distinguishes individuals applying four different behavioral strategies: non-cooperative individuals (“defectors”), cooperative individuals abstaining from punishment efforts (called “cooperators” or “second-order free-riders”), cooperators who punish non-cooperative behavior (“moralists”), and defectors, who punish other defectors despite being non-cooperative themselves (“immoralists”).
cooperation
modeling
agent-based-model
evolution
game-theory
computational-science
simulation
biology
open-access
may 2010 by tsuomela
Nonindigenous Aquatic Species
may 2010 by tsuomela
Welcome to the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) information resource for the United States Geological Survey. Located at Gainesville, Florida, this site has been established as a central repository for spatially referenced biogeographic accounts of introduced aquatic species. The program provides scientific reports, online/realtime queries, spatial data sets, regional contact lists, and general information. The data is made available for use by biologists, interagency groups, and the general public. The geographical coverage is the United States.
database
data
science
biology
species
research
water
aquatic
invasives
collaboration
project(Utenn)
may 2010 by tsuomela
The Improbability Pump
april 2010 by tsuomela
Richard Dawkins "The Greatest Show on Earth"; Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini "What Darwin Got Wrong"
book
review
evolution
biology
science
creationism
skepticism
april 2010 by tsuomela
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