Group items tagged

Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

"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"

""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.

"Social interactions require fast and efficient person perception, which is best achieved through the process of categorization. However, this process can produce pernicious outcomes, particularly in the case of stigma. This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates involved in forming both explicit ("Do you like or dislike this person?") and implicit ("Is this a male or female?") judgments of people possessing well-established stigmatized conditions (obesity, facial piercings, transsexuality, and unattractiveness), as well as normal controls. Participants also made post-scan disgust ratings on all the faces that they viewed during imaging. These ratings were subsequently examined (modeled linearly) in a parametric analysis. Regions of interest that emerged include areas previously demonstrated to respond to aversive and disgust-inducing material (amygdala and insula), as well as regions strongly associated with inhibition and control (anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortex). Further, greater differences in activation were observed in the implicit condition for both the amygdala and prefrontal cortical regions in response to the most negatively perceived faces. Specifically, as subcortical responses (e.g., amygdala) increased, cortical responses (e.g., lateral PFC and anterior cingulate) also increased, indicating the possibility of inhibitory processing. These findings help elucidate the neural underpinnings of stigma"

AskMe - Experiment Publisher is a simple to use software package for users to publish their large scale life science experiment data on to the web by use of data mining and visualization concepts. With use of AskMe, scientists can share these datasets easily with their collaborators or they can be made publicly accessible to the scientific community by Sciencenet - our distributed peer to peer search and share engine.

The SUMMIT FC46 model that is available in 33 1/2" × 22" × 24" dimensions is a platinum chest freezer made in Scotland; it is an excellent alternative to conventional white chest freezers.

the complete (non-proprietary) content of the Cyc knowledge base is being made available to the research community (for research-only purposes) under a ResearchCyc license. Yes, Cyc, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine, is at your disposal!

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

"Igor Efimov, Sarah Gutbrod Using an inexpensive 3-D printer, biomedical engineers have developed a custom-fitted, implantable device with embedded sensors that could transform treatment and prediction of cardiac disorders. The 3-D elastic membrane is made of a soft, flexible, silicon material that is precisely shaped to match the heart's outer layer of the wall. Current technology is two-dimensional and cannot cover the full surface of the epicardium or maintain reliable contact for continual use without sutures or adhesives. The team can then print tiny sensors onto the membrane that can precisely measure temperature, mechanical strain and pH, among other markers, or deliver a pulse of electricity in cases of arrhythmi"

"Gears are ubiquitous in the man-made world, found in items ranging from wristwatches to car engines, but it seems that nature invented them first. A species of plant-hopping insect, Issus coleoptratus, is the first living creature known to possess functional gears, a new study finds. The two interlocking gears on the insect's hind legs help synchronize the legs when the animal jumps."

"The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library) have joined efforts in a landmark digitization project with the aim of opening up their repositories of ancient texts. Over the course of the next four years, 1.5 million pages from their remarkable collections will be made freely available online to researchers and to the general public."

"I am a Neuroscientist working at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), University of Tübingen, Germany. In My Research I use a combination of 2-photon imaging, electrophysiology and computational modelling to unravel principles of synaptic and network computations in the vertebrate early visual system. Outside my regular work I am also co-founder of a not-for-profit organisation TReND in Africa, dedicated to foster Neuroscience Education and Research on the African continent. Moreover I am contributor to Open Labware, the design and building of open source laboratory equipment based on off-the-shelf electronics and simple mechanics as made possible by 3D printing"

Jaincolab made 9V battery holder with wire leads, with switch and cover. battery holder with wire leads, with switch and cover.

"Until recently, the disastrous scale of the threat posed by salmon farms to the fauna and National Park of the Aysen region of southern Chile was entirely unknown. The unexpected discovery was made by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Gottingen, who were studying acoustic communication among the native whales in the region."

"Scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet. "

To try to illustrate the concept, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics made the accompanying movie of "Quantum Spin Dynamics in Loop Quantum Gravity." It depicts the quantum evolution of geometry in Loop Quantum Gravity

In addition to sensing distant galaxies made entirely of antimatter, the AMS will also test leading theories of dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that comprises 83 percent of the matter in the universe. And it will search for strangelets, a theoretical form of matter that's ultra-massive because it contains so-called strange quarks

Amazing what can be made from a bit of background noise in the GEO600 with a bit of imagination (or desire). Intriguing article from 12 months ago. No new information since....

The seasonal ice cap at the South Pole (the one made of dry ice) is evaporating as Astronomers at the University of Arizona watch. A brief discussion of the geology that results.