Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This is an interesting report from a student in sociology, who worked with a group of scientists on a synthetic biology project for the competition IGEM (http://2009.igem.org/Main_Page). This is what happen when you mix hard and soft sciences. For this project they won the special prize for "Best Human Practices Advance". You can read the part on self or exploded governance (p.34). When reading parts of this reports, I thought that it could be good to have a stagiaire or a YGT in human science to see if we can raise interesting question about ethics for the space sector. There are many questions I'm sure, about the governance, the legitimacy of spending millions to go in space, etc...

is this really worth a nature paper??

Funny to read this question exactly from you, the all and ever fan of anything linked to bio :-) I have read worse papers in nature and in addition it's just "Nature physics", viz. "Nature garbage." Could be that they don't find enough really good stuff to publish in all their topical clones of Nature.

francesco already posted this below

These animal sustain 700g. We should have a look at this

Here, we report new materials and mechanical design principles of the iron-plated multilayered structure of the natural armor of Crysomallon squamiferum, a recently discovered gastropod mollusc from the Kairei Indian hydrothermal vent field, which is unlike any other known natural or synthetic engineered armor.

another one...

"As the shift to open source software continues, computational biology will become even more accessible, and even more powerful, while intellectual property and other bureaucracies continue to hobble traditional forms of research." Spot on, I'm very glad to see this happening :)

Sorry for the German, but there is a link to the english paper as well: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000278 Following up on Martin's talk, I found that on the Austrian National Broadcaster website, well not really the top source for sound science news but anyway :)

Navigation for robtos. That's how we should have done the hybrid controller study.

Well, it has always been a long discussion. Fungi are according to the most recent findings definitely no plants. Since they have always been in botanic textbooks, I would assume that they were never considered animals.No fauna, no flora, no stones. Maybe they are extraterrestrials. But that wouldn't solve the questions. Maybe they are just "fungi"?

what about then: "can we use them for space?"

Cilia are hairs driven by molecular motors. They are found in monocellular organisms, etc. If we can build such things artificially, we have micro-pumps etc. Any space usability?

carlo's distributed actuator study originally considered cilia as well as peristaltic motion if i remember right. i suppose you might still think about debris transport for digging applications. Originally there was an idea for thermal transport aswell which, it turns out, was bollocks.

Very interesting work, showing that apparently algae mastered quantum coherence a few years before us... Inspiring for a new type of light-sensitive devices, and perhaps other applications...

This is the community that states mammals have cognitive maps. Good work, especially by the Moser-couple.

I like this work... it mixes physics, networks and biology ! Anyone heard about her ? Here's an interesting paper found on this website: http://nuweb.neu.edu/gbianconi/condensation.pdf

We worked on this with Luzi a few years back ... while the analogy is original and interesting it fails to capture the dynamics of a network, e.g. if a network has hubs that grow and shrink .... Luzi worked on an extended model to solve this issue, but, if I remember correctly, he got stuck in a computationally very hard problem .... We intended to develop and use the extended model to define relevant characteristic of the ESA network formed by mail exchanges.....

...but then the CMS YGT didn't really like the project

also check out: "Dogs don't need calculus" (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maa/cmj/2010/00000041/00000001/art00003;jsessionid=ltahkvtsh76n.alexandra)

tobias - please finally put an image to your profile .... :-)

The paper looks to be very related to the idea that came out once from Tobias based on the work of Gilles Laurent. Unfortunately I don't have access to this journal, so I can't peep into the article itself.

Revised version of a 2008 paper. Pretty crazy title and perhaps crazy content...

the abstract sounds like a random generated paper...

bit confused about what they actually have achieved so far but sounds like it might turn out to be interesting. "The scientists first infiltrated the leaves of Anemone vitifolia -- a plant native to China -- with titanium dioxide in a two-step process. Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, the scientists were then able to confirm that the structural features in the leaf favorable for light harvesting were replicated in the new TiO2 structure. Excitingly, the AIL are eight times more active for hydrogen production than TiO2 that has not been "biotemplated" in that fashion. AILs also are more than three times as active as commercial photo-catalysts. Next, the scientists embedded nanoparticles of platinum into the leaf surface. Platinum, along with the nitrogen found naturally in the leaf, helps increase the activity of the artificial leaves by an additional factor of ten."

Dedicated to Tobias...