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"There is a biological story with information. I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. So too much information would be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system and too much of it confuses our biology. Here again, as with the story of the news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful. And in Chapter x (on ethics) I will show how too much data (particularly when sterile) causes statistics to be completely meaningless. Now let's add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones"

Getting Started: Social Media for Academics Collection of social media resources I've produced for Sociological Imagination, the LSE impact blog, the Warwick Research Exchange and the Digital Change GPP

Our passion for developing e-learning material for the automotive sector allows us to realize the full potential of what computers and the Internet can achieve. The Electude team is driven by a vision that we must fundamentally change the way people acquire and retain knowledge and skills - by making it fun, effective and efficient.

""We probably have underestimated the role our microbial flora play in modulating disease risk," says Daniel Rader, a heart disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Rader, who was not involved in the study, says that gut bacteria may not be as big a factor in causing heart disease as diabetes or smoking, but could be important in tipping some people toward sickness. Researchers led by Stanley Hazen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, didn't start out to study gut bacteria. In fact, says Hazen, he had "no clue - zero," that intestinal microbes were involved in heart disease. "I'd never even considered it or thought of the concept." Hazen and his colleagues compared blood plasma from healthy people to plasma from people who had had heart attacks, strokes or died to see if substances in the blood could predict who is in danger from heart disease. The researchers found 18 small molecules associated with fat buildup in the arteries. One of the best predictors turned out to be a byproduct made when gut bacteria break down a fat called choline (also known as lecithin). The more of this byproduct, called trimethylamine N-oxide or TMAO, a person or mouse has in the blood, the higher the risk of getting heart disease, the researchers found. Gut bacteria are actually middlemen in TMAO production. The microbes convert lecithin to a gas that smells like rotten fish. Then an enzyme in the liver changes the foul-smelling gas to TMAO."

OCLC Research is one of the world's leading centers devoted exclusively to the challenges facing libraries and archives in a rapidly changing information technology environment. Our mission is to expand knowledge that advances OCLC's public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing library costs. Since 1978, we have carried out research and made technological advances that enhance the value of library services and improve the productivity of librarians and library users.

"or those of you who do not have the patience to read the whole review, but are interested in the way new technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way science is done, I can say - go now and buy yourself a copy of Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. It is excellent. Worth your investment in time and money."

"Bacterial signaling controlling biofilm formation and pathogenicity Opportunistic bacterial pathogens cause a variety of infectious diseases. Their ability to sense and respond to different microenvironments, particularly during the transition from a free-living to an indwelling pathogenic lifestyle, is largely dependent on a variety of adaptational strategies (Hall-Stoodley et al., 2004). Examples include phenotypic variation, biofilm formation, resistance to antibiotic treatments and virulence gene expression, suggested to be interlinked phenotypes largely dependent on bacterial signaling and changes in their transcription profiles "

It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.  From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.  Even more so, many of them tell us that from the Overview perspective, all of this seems imminently achievable, if only more people could ha

If this can be confirmed to be correct, then it should also be able to detect changes in the earth's axis that may be a result of an earthquake or series of earthquakes.

"What are we aiming for? We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question "What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?""

"Leah Pyter: Well basically what we know is that patients with cancer have a higher likelihood of also developing depression at some point in their disease progression, so whether that occurred before and is predisposing them to cancer, or it's due to the tumours themselves, or other aspects of having the disease, we don't know. We were only studying right now whether the cancer itself can cause depression. Chris Smith: How could a tumour trigger depression, because a tumour can occur anywhere in the body, therefore at the remote sites in the brain, so how could it trigger changes in brain activity? Leah Pyter: Sure, well what we hypothesized was that the tumours themselves can produce cytokines which has been shown before. Chris Smith: These are inflammatory chemicals that drive the immune system? Leah Pyter: Right, exactly! And there is also a pile of research on how cytokines can access the brain specifically regions of the brain that are associated with depression and anxiety and emotional behaviours, and they can access the brain both tumourally through the blood, or neurally through the vegas nerves. "

"Hundreds of species of bacteria call the human gut their home. This gut "microbiome" influences our physiology and health in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now, a new study suggests that gut bacteria can even mess with the mind, altering brain chemistry and changing mood and behavior. In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how gut bacteria might influence the brain and behavior, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland. So far, most of the work has focused on how pathogenic bugs influence the brain by releasing toxins or stimulating the immune system, Cryan says. One recent study suggested that even benign bacteria can alter the brain and behavior, but until now there has been very little work in this area, Cryan says."

Welcome to the future! Here you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, projected long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore's Law, future medical breakthroughs, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Where possible, references have been provided to support the predictions. FutureTimeline.net is intended to be an ongoing, collaborative project that is open for discussion - we welcome ideas from scientists, futurists, inventors, writers and anyone else interested in the future of our world.

"Understanding the relationship between diversity and stability requires a knowledge of how species interact with each other and how each is affected by the environment. The relationship is also complex, because the concept of stability is multifaceted; different types of stability describing different properties of ecosystems lead to multiple diversity-stability relationships. A growing number of empirical studies demonstrate positive diversity-stability relationships. These studies, however, have emphasized only a few types of stability, and they rarely uncover the mechanisms responsible for stability. Because anthropogenic changes often affect stability and diversity simultaneously, diversity-stability relationships cannot be understood outside the context of the environmental drivers affecting both. This shifts attention away from diversity-stability relationships toward the multiple factors, including diversity, that dictate the stability of ecosystems."

900 years of international history from one source. Gale Digital Collections has changed the nature of research forever by providing a wealth of rare, formerly inaccessible historical content from the world's most prestigious libraries.

Science has fully entered a new mode of operation. E-science, defined as a combination of science, informatics, computer science, cyberinfrastructure and information technology is changing the way all of these disciplines do both their individual and collaborative work.

Linked Data Research Centre (LiDRC) Laboratory The LiDRC Lab is a collection of tools and demos we are working on in the Linked Data Research Centre, DERI at NUI Galway. Experimental Tools & Services In the table below you'll find tools and services we are experimenting with. They are likely not stable and are subject to (rapid) change.

UnCollege isn't just an idea or a website. It's a movement. It's a lifestyle. We believe that college isn't the only path to success. UnCollege is a social movement changing the notion that going to college is the only path to success. We empower students to hack their education through resources, writing, and workshops. We believe that everyone can live an UnCollege life by hacking their education.

"Formal education must adapt to these changes, taking advantage of new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence and compensating for new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes: abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination. These develop through the use of an older technology, reading, which, along with audio media such as radio, also stimulates imagination. Informal education therefore requires a balanced media diet using each technology's specific strengths in order to develop a complete profile of cognitive skills. "

"For study author Dan Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the "deficit model" in the field of science and technology studies-the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan's data suggest the opposite-that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy"