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"Individuals who are homozygous for the G allele of the rs53576 SNP of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene tend to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. However, little is known about how these differences manifest behaviorally and whether they are readily detectable by outside observers, both critical questions in theoretical accounts of prosociality. In the present study, we used thin-slicing methodology to test the hypotheses that (i) individual differences in rs53576 genotype predict how prosocial observers judge target individuals to be on the basis of brief observations of behavior, and (ii) that variation in targets' nonverbal displays of affiliative cues would account for these judgment differences. In line with predictions, we found that individuals homozygous for the G allele were judged to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. These differences were completely accounted for by variations in the expression of affiliative cues. Thus, individual differences in rs53576 are associated with behavioral manifestations of prosociality, which ultimately guide the judgments others make about the individual. "

"SOCIAL insects are often dismissed as slaves to the collective mind of the hive. But individual members of colonies do have brains and are technically capable of making their own decisions. Indeed, several studies have shown that insects such as ants and bees sometimes ignore shared information in favour of what they individually know. What drives them to act independently has been something of a mystery. New research shows that when a tasty source of food is available the hive mentality is blatantly ignored"

Tamir DI, Mitchell JP. Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. dtamir@fas.harvard.edu Abstract Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self.

Because the size of these metallic hotspots is far smaller than the wavelength of incident light, a new technique was needed to map the electromagnetic field within a hotspot. The Berkeley researchers developed the BEAST method to capitalize on the fact that individual fluorescent dye molecules can be localized with single nanometer accuracy. The fluorescence intensity of individual molecules adsorbed on the surface provides a direct measure of the electromagnetic field inside a single hotspot. BEAST utilizes the Brownian motion of single dye molecules in a solution to make the dyes scan the inside of single hotspot stochastically, one molecule at a time.

Our goal is to get our students worldwide(technically oriented individuals), who due to their socio-economic status don't have fund to study robotics engineering at a university, learn to design and build robust, intelligent robots for a university robotics engineering degree.

The Haiti Memory Project is an  oral history project about the January 12, 2010, earthquake and post-earthquake life. The earthquake is a point-zero in the lives of individual Haitians and in Haitian history; it is a moment that divided time into "before" and "after". The project attempts to document that change.

"So-called jumping genes, segments of DNA that can copy and paste them­selves into new places in the genome, can alter the activity of full-length genes. Occasionally they will turn on neighboring genes in these locations. That activity occurs more in the brain than other areas, resulting in different traits and behaviors, even in closely related individuals. These mobile genetic elements may also turn out to play a role in people's disposition to psychiatric disorders"

"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"

Virtuoso is an innovative enterprise grade multi-model data server for agile enterprises & individuals. It delivers an unrivaled platform agnostic solution for data management, access, and integration.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence supports individual researchers and research groups. We also sponsor conferences, prizes, competitions, and the construction of large public knowledge bases and evaluation frameworks. We are particularly interested in partnering with corporate and public-sector entities in order to leverage complementary resources.

""We wondered how individuals assess the credibility of other people in simple social interactions," said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "We found a strong correlation between the amygdala and a baseline level of distrust, which may be based on a person's beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people in general, his or her emotional state, and the situation at hand"

"It is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice that goods should be distributed to individuals according to their contribution, i.e., people should receive equal pay for equal work (equity principle)...Recently, neuroscientific studies have begun to address neural processes underlying social and economic phenomena like e.g., reactions to norm violations, status concerns, and reactions to unfair behavior. These studies have convergingly identified brain regions that are important for these aspects of social behavior. One consistent finding is that activations of the dopaminergic mesolimbic ("reward") system, especially the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) do not exclusively reflect material self-interest, but also social aspects

"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."

""Experiments with amoebae that usually live as individuals but must also join with others to form multicellular bodies to complete their life cycles showed that cooperation depends on kinship. If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit. A multicellular body like the human body is an incredibly cooperative thing," Queller says, "and sociobiologists have learned that really cooperative things are hard to evolve because of the potential for cheating. "It's the single-cell bottleneck that generates high relatedness among the cells that, in turn, allows them to cooperate, " he says."

"Our knowledge of species and functional composition of the human gut microbiome is rapidly increasing, but it is still based on very few cohorts and little is known about variation across the world. By combining 22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter) that are not nation or continent specific. We also confirmed the enterotypes in two published, larger cohorts, indicating that intestinal microbiota variation is generally stratified, not continuous. This indicates further the existence of a limited number of well-balanced host-microbial symbiotic states that might respond differently to diet and drug intake."

"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."

Access the Wolfram|Alpha platform at multiple levels-from individual results to complete Wolfram|Alpha output pages. The API operates as a high-performance REST-style webservice, with convenient bindings for popular languages and platforms.

Mathematica is renowned as the world's ultimate application for computations. But it's much more-it's the only development platform fully integrating computation into complete workflows, moving you seamlessly from initial ideas all the way to deployed individual or enterprise solutions.

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.

"Since cancers have individual clonal karyotypes, are immortal and evolve from normal cells treated by carcinogens only after exceedingly long latencies of many months to decades-we deduce that carcinogenesis may be a form of speciation. This theory proposes that carcinogens initiate carcinogenesis by causing aneuploidy, i.e., losses or gains of chromosomes. Aneuploidy destabilizes the karyotype, because it unbalances thousands of collaborating genes including those that synthesize, segregate and repair chromosomes. Driven by this inherent instability aneuploid cells evolve ever-more random karyotypes automatically. Most of these perish, but a very small minority acquires reproductive autonomy-the primary characteristic of cancer cells and species"