Group items tagged

Seems like astrologists were somehow right... Ptolemy would be proud.

Greetings from July :-) On an unrelated note... this chart made me suddenly realise I've been always thinking of the year as passing counter-clockwise and starting at the bottom. Very strongly. Seems like some tempo-spatial association. Anybody has a similar feeling?

memory cloning

"It would be very easy not to co-operate, and then it wouldn't work", that's still the important part. I'm sure Dario LOVES this paper. Would be nice to have a coffee with him right now...

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.

fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."

It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...

Oxford University scientists find that a complex skill such as juggling causes changes in the white matter of the brain. - Let's start juggling for the ideastorm!

cool. I can do some lessons with three and four balls... tomorrow after lunch !

a study from a dutch university

I knew it --- we have to fire Fairouz, Nina and Friederike!!! your sheer presence is impacting the performance of the male researchers in the team!!!

a survey made by Leiden University yeah!

more for our BMI agenda ....

Embedded sensors in humans monitoring specific health parameters.

Working too much in not good for mental health, it's proven !

Marek, let it all out - it's good for you!

Wow, that's spooky - we did some work on organ regeneration, didn't we?

any volunteers?

An overview of all the neurotech companies messing with the brain. When reading this I really wonder why we need ethical approval for everything in human research.

Nice paper and linked to so many other factors.... curious "The question of whether mean body temperature is changing over time is not merely a matter of idle curiosity. Human body temperature is a crude surrogate for basal metabolic rate which, in turn, has been linked to both longevity (higher metabolic rate, shorter life span) and body size (lower metabolism, greater body mass). We speculated that the differences observed in temperature between the 19th century and today are real and that the change over time provides important physiologic clues to alterations in human health and longevity since the Industrial Revolution."

A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain.

"scientists at Harvard University say they've modified the CRISPR method so it can be used to effectively reverse mutations involving changes in one letter of the genetic code. That's important because two-thirds of genetic illness in humans involve mutations where there's a change in a single letter."

"Efficient introduction of specific homozygous and heterozygous mutations using CRISPR/Cas9" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17664.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160428&spMailingID=51249830&spUserID=MTEzODM0NjYzMzgS1&spJobID=903461217&spReportId=OTAzNDYxMjE3S0 As posted here previously, the number and importance of CRISPR is growing steadily, but still plenty of work to make it a reliable tool. Maybe, next work for the Molecular Engineering RF?

encouraging ...

Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars.

and in the headlines again ...

I suggested earlier today that the US military R&D spending was about 75% of all R&D spending worldwide. Leopold called me on it - and I have to admitt: it was BS. Apparently military R&D in the US is ~75% (82 billion $ in 2011) of the total non-health R&D. Unfortunately I could not find the source where I read the 75% figure initially to check their wording. Nonetheless: I think those 82 billion could be spent better (including giving them to me)...