Group items tagged

Explore & Share at 9th World Congress on Biopolymers & Bioplastics, London, UK (A solution for Current & Future Global Predicament) August 26-27, 2019 London, UK: Since 2016, Biopolymer Congress has been contributing successfully to the global scientific research field. 8th World Congress on Biopolymers & Bioplastics was held during June 28-29, 2018 at Berlin, Germany with the theme "Biopolymer- A Drug to heal the nature". Active participation of Scientists, Engineers, Researchers, Students and Leaders from the fields of Polymer Science, plastics, Green technology, medical, and Biomaterials is highly appreciated and made this event a blast. Thanks to all of our Organizing Committee members, honourable guests, wonderful speakers, conference attendees and Media partners. With the success of Biopolymer Congress 2018 at Berlin, we are feeling proud to announce Biopolymer Congress 2019 conference with the theme "A solution for current & future Global predicament", is going to held in London, UK, during August 26-27, 2019. Importance and Scope: Over the past few years, global economic activities have increased a lot. This tremendous growth has raised serious problems about current important patterns of production and consumption. As the current society has increased its attention in understanding of the environmental aspects and its industrial practices, greater attention has been given to the concept of sustainable economic systems that rely on energy from undepletable source and materials. The use of biologically derived Polymers become as an important component of this global world. The history of Biopolymer is not a long one. Various reasons are associated with the research and development of Biopolymers. Use of Bioplastics will make a tremendous change and will help rid of the conventional plastics, which is a welcome change. Why to attend?: To take preventive steps for Global Predicament, Biopolymer Congress 2019 offers a fantastic opportunity to meet and

Das Vogelweibchen gibt den Ton an, Current Biology http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2812%2901125-6 "Vogeleltern und andere Artgenossen, die bei der Brutpflege helfen, füttern den Nachwuchs nur dann, wenn der Bettelruf der Jungen das gelernte Passwort enthält", erklärt Studienautorin Sonia Kleindorfer von der Flinders University in Australien. Sie und ihr Team entdeckten den Coderuf eher zufällig, als sie Nester des Prachtstaffelschwanzes beobachteten. Ursprünglich untersuchten die Forscher Alarmrufe, welche die Singvögel im Angesicht von Nesträubern von sich geben. Dabei fiel ihnen das seltsame Verhalten der brütenden Vögel auf: Die Mütter sangen dem ungeschlüpften Nachwuchs einen bestimmten Ton vor. Der spätere Bettelgesang des Nachwuchses ähnelte offenbar dem Ruf der Mütter."

'The Named Data Networking (NDN) project aims to develop a new Internet architecture that can capitalize on strengths - and address weaknesses - of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their locations, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity. The current Internet secures the data container. NDN secures the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth.'

Apply the electrodes... Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current. Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679). More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080). Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098). Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106).

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

"The Decentralized Library of Alexandria is an open-source standard in active development to allow users to publish and distribute original content themselves, from music to videos to feature films, 3d printable inventions, recipes, books and just about anything else. It is a unified, ever-growing library of art, history and culture which users interact with through a variety of front end apps. A native browser is in continuing development, but the Alexandria standard can also be used by other open source developers and even current industry incumbents like YouTube, Soundcloud, iTunes and Netflix to offer a far superior value proposition to content providers and a better experience for users than currently available."

quantum

DiscOU is a resources discovery engine relying on a semantic index of Open University Open Content. It semantically analyses the content of an online resource, and matches it by similarity to other existing Open University content to retrieve the most relevant pieces. It currently works with BBC programme pages, as demonstrated in the video below, as well as from text entered/pasted in the DiscOU alfa interface.

DiscOU is a resources discovery engine relying on a semantic index of Open University Open Content. It semantically analyses the content of an online resource, and matches it by similarity to other existing Open University content to retrieve the most relevant pieces. It currently works with BBC programme pages, as demonstrated in the video below, as well as from text entered/pasted in the DiscOU alfa interface.

the educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam. Starting in September you will be able to take part in our worldwide social learning network based on interactive online courses covering different subjects in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Enter a fascinating world of knowledge with our free open online courses. Meet other participants from around the world and familiarize yourself with fundamental and current topics in ICT, computer science and IT systems engineering.

Web of Science ® provides researchers, administrators, faculty, and students with quick, powerful access to the world's leading citation databases.  Authoritative, multidisciplinary content covers over 12,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings.  You'll find current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, with coverage to 1900. Overcome information overload and focus on essential data across more than 250 disciplines.

The Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. Our current projects are here but plenty more are on the way. If you're new to the Zooniverse, we suggest picking a project and diving in - the same account will get you into all of our projects,

"Our ethos: We help people make sense of current discussions rather than taking them back to school We stand up for scientific inquiry, free from stigma, intimidation, hysteria or censorship We want everyone, whatever their experience, to stand up for evidence in public life"

"Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature."

"A team of scientists at Oxford University have printed - yes, printed - what could be the predecessors to usable synthetic human tissue. The researchers released a paper called A Tissue-Like Material, announcing that they created their own version of a 3D printer, saying the current ones on the market couldn't print what they were after, according to PhsyOrg. And what were they after? A protein sack of water that can mold itself into different shapes and perform similar functions to human cells. After developing the printer, the team was able to print out a series of droplets that formed a network of human-like cells that could act like nerves and send electrical signals across the network."

"Tissue engineering is often thought of as a "Frankenstein-type" science where scientists build living tissues from otherwise "dead" tissues and organs. However, current advances in technology mean bringing life to cadaveric tissues is becoming more and more sophisticated: less of the lightning strikes and more stem cells and 3D printing!"

@Spatzlhirn "Afrikanische Mistkäfer (Scarabaeus satyrus) orientieren sich nicht nur an der Sonne, dem Mond und der Polarisation des Tageslichtes. Anders als viele andere Insekten nutzen sie für die Navigation offenbar auch die Sterne. Genau genommen ist es die Milchstraße - jener Teil unserer Galaxie, der als helles Band am nächtlichen Himmel zu sehen ist - um in mondlosen Nächten ihren Weg zu finden. Das berichten Marie Dacke von der Universität Lund und ihre Kollegen aus Schweden und Südafrika im Fachjournal Current Biology (online)."

"Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das angeborene Fluchtverhalten auf Kohlendioxid in Fruchtfliegen je nach ihrem Sättigungszustand von zwei parallelen neuronalen Schaltkreisen gesteuert wird. „Ist die Fliege hungrig, verlässt sie sich nicht mehr auf die "direkte Leitung", sondern benutzt Hirnzentren, mit denen sie interne und äußere Signale abwägen und eine ausgewogene Entscheidung treffen kann", erklärt Grunwald-Kadow und fügt hinzu: „Es ist faszinierend, in welchem Ausmaß der Stoffwechsel und Hunger die verarbeitenden Prozesse im Gehirn beeinflussen." ***** Lasse B. Bräcker, K.P. Siju, Nelia Varela, Yoshinori Aso, Mo Zhang, Irina Hein, Maria Luisa Vasconcelos, Ilona C. Grunwald Kadow Essential role of the mushroom body in context dependent CO2 avoidance in Drosophila Current Biology, 13 June 2013 Max-Planck-Institut für Neurobiologie"

Stratosphere is a DFG-funded research project investigating "Information Management on the Cloud" and creating the Stratosphere System for Big Data Analytics. The current openly released version is 0.2 with many new features and enhancements for usability, robustness, and performance. See the Change Log for a complete list of new features.

"Currently making 1.67TB of research data available. Sharing data is hard. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We've designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets - for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds."