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"Rather, these successful men needed to also be blessed with "zeal and with capacity for hard labour." This study is a first glimpse into those essential qualities described by Galton, helping us map out the individual differences that make it slightly easier for some people to engage in hard labor. These diligent souls seem to get a bit more pleasure from the possibility of reward, but they also seem less sensitive to their inner complainer, that disruptive voice reminding them that minesweeper is more fun than editing, or that the ballgame on television is much more entertaining than their homework. At any given moment, there is a tug of war unfolding in our head, determining whether or not we're willing to put in the effort. This sentence only exists because, for a few minutes at least, I was able to win the war."

""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."

"The results are indeed worthy of attention, with Prof Taylor's team finding that in an early stage clinical trial of 11 people who were put on a diet of just 600 calories As written about in Dr Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column, producing a pattern from experimental data to come to a conclusion can be a 'magical' experience, but medicine is an 'imperfect art'. "We all know one atom of experience isn't enough to spot a pattern." writes Goldacre, "But when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get new knowledge.""

"We often think that the limiting factors to doing science are intellectual or technological. There are many unsolved scientific problems that we know how to answer. We aren't waiting for any conceptual breakthroughs or new technologies. We're waiting for people. We need "hands at the bench" to put in the time to collect the data. The instabilities of salary is a major limiting factor for science and is probably a big reason a lot of them get out of science: they don't see a way to pay the bills. Creating permanent, stable positions for scientists would release a lot of scientific research."

Science is an assault on ignorance, Its legacies are concepts, technologies and databases. As with many walks in life, the most glamorous legacies tend to get the most attention and the least are neglected

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"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."

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"And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "These studies were designed to help understand the so-called 'ignorance is bliss' approach to social issues," said author Steven Shepherd, a graduate student with the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues."

The Hacker Academy takes its members on an impressive journey from the hacker's perspective. THA delves into the psyche of a hacker: what they want, how they will get it - and an "it takes one to know one mentality". Our philosophy at The Hacker Academy is that members will be armed with the knowledge necessary to practice, implement, and deploy what they have learned immediately and effectively. All training modules are available 24/7 and are perfect for any skill level.

Dr Simon Archer and his team at Surrey University were particularly interested in looking at the genes that were switched on or off in our volunteers by changes in the amount that we had made them sleep. "We found that overall there were around 500 genes that were affected," Archer explained. "Some which were going up, and some which were going down." What they discovered is that when the volunteers cut back from seven-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours' sleep a night, genes that are associated with processes like inflammation, immune response and response to stress became more active. The team also saw increases in the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. The reverse happened when the volunteers added an hour of sleep. So the clear message from this experiment was that if you are getting less than seven hours' sleep a night and can alter your sleep habits, even just a little bit, it could make you healthier

"In short, this site is a record of my learning process as I try to understand aspects of colony health and productivity, and the reasons why various management techniques work (or don't). If you are a beginning beekeeper looking for basic information, or an experienced beekeeper looking for a summary of mite treatment options, I suggest that you go directly to Basic Beekeeping. I started keeping bees as a hobbyist in 1967, and then went on to get university degrees in biological sciences, specializing in entomology. In 1980 I began to build a migratory beekeeping operation in California, and currently run about 1000 hives with my two sons, from which we make our livings. In 1993, the varroa mite arrived in California, and after it wiped out my operation for the second time in 1999, I decided to "hit the books" and use my scientific background to learn to fight back"

"Everybody likes a simple cause and effect - something we can point to and say (ommitting a few choice words to the perpetrators), 'Fix this and the bees will be right again.' Reality is rarely so straightforward. As the bee decline has progressed I've lost count of the simple 'causes' that have been presented. Among the more memorable are: * mobile 'phones (the absolute 'definite cause' of choice a couple of years ago) * mobile base stations, power lines and other strong electromagnetic sources (a perennial favourite for any malaise) * alien abduction (hopefully they have smaller probes for abducted bees...) * God's punishment (pro gay-marriage states in the USA have more cases of CCD) Leo's article shows neonicotinoids are at least a plausible candidate and they are surely not good for bees, but the argument for these being the explicit 'cause' of global bee decline is still not particularly strong. The risk here is that the media and vocal lobbyists are going off on a righteous crusade to the detriment of more diligent, and maybe less newsworthy, efforts to get to the root of a complex problem. Rather than reviewing the evidence here, I recommend a visit to Randy Oliver's website where his two recent articles from the American Bee Journalon this topic can be found, along with some further commentary on his home page. Interested readers can also directly access the study by Henry et. al. (2012a), the commentry on this study by Creswell and Thompson (2012), the response to the comment (Henry et. al. 2012b) and to the meta-analysis of toxicological studies on imidacloprid by Creswell (2010). An example of one such study is Cutler and Scott-Dupree (2007). Links to all are included below. These are original material rather than reportage and demonstrate the complexity of the issue. As food for thought, I'll leave you with the following: * Neonicotinoids are widely used in Australia and our bees are not (yet) in decline."

"Below is a list of commonly used scholarly resources at MIT that make their APIs available for use.  If you have programming skills and would like to use APIs in your research, use the table below to get an overview of some available APIs. "

"Hudnall: I really do believe that repression makes you sick. I'm big believer of what is coming out in the neuroscience and therapy community. Brene Brown, who is a shame and guilt expert, said it best: "We have an epidemic of shame in this country." If you keep things inside and have no one to talk to - and this is not crystals and patchouli - you will get sick, you will be miserable, you will ruin your relationships, and you will be unhappy. I know people whose lives were ruined by silence. Especially women. The one thing that has really opened my eyes while teaching is just what we do to our women. Only my women students have said to me, "I don't know if I have anything worth saying." It smacks me in the face every day. We are really fucking up our women"

"Kathryn Taylor, associate professor in the Cancer Control Program, on conflicting advice about men getting tested for prostate cancer: "We tell men that there's no right or wrong answer [regarding prostate-specific antigen testing] at present, and it really comes down to a personal choice. And the onus, unfortunately, is on them to really educate themselves about the potential benefits as well as the potential harms." American Cancer Society Stands By Cancer Screening Guidelines October 22, 2009, MSN"

.. you can use to show the global effects of research paywalls - and to help get access to the research you need. Every time you hit a paywall blocking your research, click the button. Fill out a short form, add your experience to the map along with thousands of others.

"Researchers say they want to emphasize, however, that the HPV vaccine commonly used by millions of women around the world is perfectly safe if done prior to infection with the virus. The concerns raised by this study relate only to viral therapies or possible use of a therapeutic vaccine after the virus has already been integrated into human cells. "It's been known for decades that only women with prior infection with HPV get cervical cancer," said Andrey Morgun, an assistant professor and a leader of the study in the OSU College of Pharmacy. "In about 90 percent of cases it's naturally eliminated, often without any symptoms. But in a small fraction of cases it can eventually lead to cancer, in ways that have not been fully understood.""

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