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The universe bounces back, & robots fight humans: Today on New Scientist: stories from 13 October 2010

I have a number of trees at my farm house but because of some reason they started to dry fast. Thanks to Arbor Care, Inc. Because of you guys today my farm house looks alive. I must say that the team members of Arbor Care, Inc. are real tree doctors.

"Today the Iowa Department of Education (DE) released a report on achievement levels in Iowa compared to other states. The report also focuses heavily on closing the significant achievement gaps that exist in our state. Here are some very quick reactions that I have to the report…"

a collection of LTI apps you can use in your classes today. Not familiar with LTI? Basically it's like Facebook apps or Google widgets, but interoperable between lots of edu tools. Browse this site to find tutorials, extensions and other resources.

"The results are published in Nature Medicine today. Co-author Stanley Hazen, head of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, says that the study could signal a new approach to diet and health. In some cases, an individual's collection of intestinal microbes may be as important to their diet as anything on a nutrition label, he says. "Bacteria make a whole slew of molecules from food," he says, "and those molecules can have a huge effect on our metabolic processes.""

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ChronoZoom is an intuitive on-line tool used to visualize all of time, from the Big Bang to today, using the concept of zooming along the timeline to express distance to highlight the scope of time. 

William Gunn The Top 10 papers in Biological Sciences by Mendeley readership. With the Mendeley for Life Scientists webinar coming up on Thursday, I thought I would take a look at the readership stats for Biological Sciences. Biological Sciences has long been our biggest discipline, and having done my doctoral work in the Life Sciences, I knew this would be interesting. Overall, researchers in bioinformatics contributed most strongly to the most read papers, along with the older disciplines of micro- and molecular biology. Regardless of discipline, however, it's clear that the days of toiling away in isolation to thoroughly study one gene are over. Today, it's all about huge consortia and massive data. Here's what I found

Has a cheap and effective treatment for chronic pain been lying under clinicians' noses for decades? Researchers have found that a very high dose of an opiate drug that uses the same painkilling pathways as morphine can reset the nerve signals associated with continuous pain - at least in rats. If confirmed in humans, the procedure could reduce or eliminate the months or years that millions of patients spend on pain-managing prescription drugs. The results of the study are described today in Science1.

"I am going to try and experiment within an experiment today. I cloned a couple genes from yeast and have been spending months now trying to get them into several vectors for my combinatorial overexpression project. However, as it goes with wet messy biology, this seemingly simple process has been fighting me tooth and nail. I have retrieved one good clone out of 56 minipreps (plasmid construct isolation) and tried several ligations. So I have tripled down this week. In the picture here, I have 32 tubes, each with 5 individual E. coli colonies. That is a grand total of 160 isolates. 1.5 mL of cells have been transferred from overnight cultures and I am about to spin, lyse, and retrieve."

"Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time."

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"Today, the White House honored twelve people across the country that they considered to be "Champions Of Change" in Citizen Science. I was one of the twelve who were nominated and then selected. I do feel quite honored. I was asked to write a few words on my thoughts about citizen science for the White House blog - here's what I had to say."

"The Knowledge Web today is an activity rather than a web site-an expedition in time, space, and technology to map the interior landscape of human thought and experience. Thanks to the work of a team of dedicated volunteers, it will soon be an interactive space on the web where students, teachers, and other knowledge seekers can explore information in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events."

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2010) - A new analysis of the extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals more than 10,000 years ago suggests that they may have fallen victim to the same type of "trophic cascade" of ecosystem disruption that scientists say is being caused today by the global decline of predators such as wolves, cougars, and sharks.

"More than 35 years ago, Matthieu Ricard left a promising career in cellular genetics to study Buddhism in the Himalayas. After earning a doctorate in biology from the prestigious Pasteur Institute in France, Ricard left Paris and moved to Darjeeling, India to study with a great Tibetan master. Today, Ricard draws upon his recent writings, research into brain plasticity and cognitive neuropsychology, and his work with neuroscientists and Buddhist practitioners at the Mind and Life Institute (co-founded by the Dalai Lama), while examining the interconnecting relationship between meditation, brain circuitry, and emotional balance."

Ten years ago today, NASA launched the Chandra X-Ray Observatory aboard the space shuttle Columbia. And it has provided stunning images from the high-energy

Researchers have regressed human stem cells to an embryonic state using just a single transcription factor, as opposed to the four factors previously needed to induce pluripotency in human cells, according to a study published online today (August 28) in Nature.