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December 9th, 02005 - Sam Harris"The View From The End Of The World"This is an audio only presentation. This talk took place in the Conference Center Golden Gate Room, San Francisco. Quote: With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaningthe quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or

Telomeres, the repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of linear chromosomes, have an important function: They protect vulnerable chromosome ends from molecular attack. Researchers at Rockefeller University now show that telomeres have their own weakness. They resemble unstable parts of the genome called fragile sites where DNA replication can stall and go awry. But what keeps our fragile telomeres from falling apart is a protein that ensures the smooth progression of DNA replication to the end of a chromosome.

John Markoff reports on the impending end of Moore's Law. It's a well-written story, but it's one that could have been told--and has been--many times before.

Research in microbiology is done to determine how these organisms prove beneficial to human health. Microbial genetics also deals with the transfer of the desired gene from any source of the plant. Besides this, microbiological studies are involved with an end to end the study of each and every drug we use today.

NEIL (Never Ending Image Learner) is a computer program that runs 24 hours per day and 7 days per week to automatically extract visual knowledge from Internet data. It is an effort to build the world's largest visual knowledge base with minimum human labeling effort - one that would be useful to many computer vision and AI efforts. See current statistics about how much NEIL knows about our world!!

Earth observation data have increased considerably over the last decades with satellite sensors collecting and transmitting back to Earth several terabytes of data per day. This data acquisition rate is a major challenge to existing data management, exploitation and dissemination approaches used by various agencies such as ESA, NASA and European national space agencies. To make the available petabytes of EO data easily accessible by an even larger group of end user applications, TELEIOS will design and implement a Virtual Earth Observatory by building on the following state of the art technologies:

"Es ist ein Medizinertraum und wäre Ende des Organspende-Dilemmas: ein 3-D-Printer, der ganze Organe druckt. Forscher haben erste Prototypen konstruiert. Sie können Haut oder Mini-Nieren produzieren. Schon in ein paar Jahren könnten die künstlichen Gewebe Patienten helfen, hoffen die Forscher"

"Plastic is produced in large amounts and used for various purposes. After use, huge amounts end up in the enviroment, often in the oceans. There, fragmentation leads to small particles, called microplastics. By filtrating and benthos-feeding organisms it can be inadvertently taken up as food. We demonstrate that the unicellular ciliate Paramecium, the freshwater flea Daphnia and the blue mussel Mytilus took up microplastic particles. Even more, in Mytilus, the plastic particles were transported into the digestive gland and accumulated in the respective cells. Subsequently, pathological alterations in the gland were noted. Microplastics are of concern because animals might starve with a full belly after uptaking large amounts of microplastics. As well, particles with sharp edges can injure the mucous layer of the gastrointestinal tract. Furthermore, persistent organic pollutants adhere at plastic and thus, may cause adverse impacts on the animal. We show options for solutions and indicate selected organisations working on the development of solution"

"Die Forscher um Juniorprofessor Dr. Martin Thanbichler von der Philipps-Universität beschreiben die neu entdeckte Struktur in der aktuellen Ausgabe der Fachzeitschrift „Cell", die am 7. Dezember erscheint. „Für Bakterien ist dies das erste Beispiel einer Barriere, welche die Proteindiffussion einschränkt", erklärt Thanbichler, der eine Arbeitsgruppe am Marburger Max-Planck-Institut für terrestrische Mikrobiologie leitet und als Seniorautor des Aufsatzes firmiert. Er und sein Team untersuchten das Modellbakterium Caulobacter crescentus, das an einem Ende einen Stiel bildet, der durch Querbänder unterteilt ist. Er dient vermutlich als Abstandshalter, der die Zelle bei Nährstoffmangel von der Oberfläche entfernt und so in Bereiche erhöhter Nährstoffkonzentrationen bringt."

"My link was shared by Bora Zivkovic, whose network is immense. And in turn, the link was shared by Twitter users in Greece, Germany, Belgium and throughout the United States. In the end, the blogpost wound up with 109 readers on January 22nd - with about 50 via Twitter, 26 via Facebook, and others via LinkedIn and elsewhere. When each person shared the link with her or his network, the momentum is carried forward, pushing out to new networks and new degrees of separation. Social sharing is a bit like the emails you would get forwarded by your relatives (you know, those emails). The deeper you scroll down the thread, the less sender names you recognize. But with Twitter, and using analytics like WordPress or Google, you can actually trace how a little link travels through different social networks, and eventually back to your website. Also, because many people embed a small bio or website link in their Twitter profile, I can quickly see who has retweeted and read my link. I can read their tweets to get an idea of their profession and passions,"

"What they found here was a negative correlation. The MORE serotonin transporters you had, the less likely you were to reject unfair offers. The authors interpret this to mean that people with lower levels of serotonin transporter had a harsher sense of "fairness", than those with higher levels of serotonin transporter, and were more inclined to reject unfair offers. Why could this be the case? The authors looked at the personalities of the individuals. You might think that people with more aggressive personalities (or at least a tendency to get offended) might be more likely to reject unfair offers, but it turned out that this wasn't the case. Instead, it was people with more peaceful personalities, but stronger measures of trust, were more likely to reject the unfair offers. The authors believe that the people with higher trustfulness had higher standards of behavior, and thus were more likely to reject unfair offers, even if the rejected ended up badly for them"

Die SZ schreibt heute, 04.07.12 über Vania Apkarian, der mittels Kernspin Schmerzpatienten untersucht hat... "Bei jenen 19 Personen, deren Schmerzen am Ende des jahres anhielten, kommunizierten die sog. insula und der Nucl acc. besonders intensiv miteinander. Diese Hirnregionen sind an der Verarbeitung von Gefühlen und am Lernen beteiligt. !Womöglich! lässt das Leid jene Menschen nicht mehr los, die es besonders emotional verarbeiten. +Ute Panzenboeck und es gibt mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit eben doch 'T- und F- Menschen' ... vgl. Post von gestern vgl. http://ed.iiQii.de/gallery/Die-iiQii-Philosophie/DK_CGJ vgl. Susan Cain: http://www.geistundgegenwart.de/2011/08/still-die-bedeutung-von-introvertierten.html vgl. ed.iiQii.de/gallery/Die-iiQii-Philosophie/MartinBartonitz_saperion_de etc. Alle unsere (Patienten)-Studien beruhen immer auf einem Durchschnitt(-smensch), der gar nichts aussagt... http://www.geistundgegenwart.de/2012/01/frauen-und-manner-sind-verschieden.html

"Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. Rheingold proposes that our intention should be to teach ourselves how to teach ourselves online, and to share what we learn"

"Die meisten klassischen Publikationsformen der Wissenschaft entstanden im 17. Jahrhundert: Sie gehen zurück auf Briefsammlungen, die wissenschaftliche Gesellschaften untereinander verschickten. Die Verteilungszyklen richteten sich nach der Frequenz des Postkutschenverkehrs, weshalb man die Briefe für den Versand zusammenband. Dieses Prozedere aufgrund von fast vierhundert Jahren alten Strukturen brachte schließlich die in Ausgaben bestimmter Journale organisierten Artikel hervor."

"At least it doesn't when you practise over and over again without a break. Sydney scientists have found learning improves when students take a rest from continuous study or training. ''It seems intuitive that every minute of study should make you better, but, actually, if you do too much it might backfire and you end up wasting time,'' said the study's lead researcher, Joel Pearson."

Tabula will be platform and content agnostic, working with as many brands and versions of tablet computers as possible. Of course, compatibility takes coding hours, so we'll start with one or two platforms and build from there. But let's just say we fully recognize the value of high-end and lower-cost hardware when it comes to solutions to help schools thrive.

"Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:"

"DSpace@MIT is a growing collection of MIT's research that includes peer-reviewed articles, technical reports, working papers, theses and more. End-user downloads of the 60,000+ items regularly exceed one million per month."