Group items tagged

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

IOS Press serves the information needs of scientific and medical communities worldwide. See what's new and browse our books and journals to learn more.

Searching articles has never been so easy! 0.8 Million articles are searchable at the word level. Just enter your keywords and press enter. We are using the latest technology and we are permanently updating, in order to offer you the easiest way to get the information you are really interested in.

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery.

"The press had a tendency to consistently overestimate [biohackers'] capabilities and underestimate our ethics. We have personal computing, why not personal biotech? That's the question biologist Ellen Jorgensen and her colleagues asked themselves before opening Genspace, a nonprofit DIYbio lab in Brooklyn devoted to citizen science, where amateurs can go and tinker with biotechnology. Far from being a sinister Frankenstein's lab (as some imagined it), Genspace offers a long list of fun, creative and practical uses for DIYbio. Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, which brings scientific exploration and understanding to the masses"

"t turns out that all over the world there were people trying to do similar things - opening biohacker spaces. Three years later, this is a thriving global community. Each lab has a flavor of where it was created - people work together or alone, in big cities or small villages, they build things and take them apart, and do much, much more. The spirit is open. But what about the dark side? What about biosafety, biosecurity? The minute Genspace opened their doors, journalists called. And the only question they wanted to ask was, "Would this lab create the next Frankenstein?" The press was overestimating their capabilities - and underestimating their ethic"

"Michael Nielsen ist Buchautor und ein Vertreter der Open Access/Open Science Bewegung. Sein Buch, „Reinventing Discovery" wird im Oktober bei Princeton University Press erscheinen. Michael Nielsen hat als international renommierter Physiker die Forschung an Quanten-Computern mit begründet, das Standard-Lehrbuch des Gebiets verfasst und über 50 wissenschaftliche Fachartikel publiziert bevor er seine Professur 2008 aufgab um sich voll und ganz der Open Access/Open Science Bewegung zu widmen."

"It is important to be aware that 20th century media ecosystem is a very unusual aberration in the way people communicated throughout history. Means of production were expensive. Very few people could afford to own printing presses, radio and TV studios, etc. Running all that complicated equipment required technical expertise and professional training. Thus media became locked up in silos, hierarchical, broadcast-only with little-to-none (and then again centrally controlled) means for feedback. There was a wealthy, vocal minority that determined what was news, and how to frame it, and the vast majority was consuming the news in silence"

Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn't taken a friend's advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old's biology lessons. Mule's precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth's excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin's theory. "I thought she was going to have a coronary," Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. "She's like, 'This is not true!'"

Home Fooling.

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press. All of our books are available for free online and for sale in print.

'It is now virtually certain a child born in 1979 will not reach 50 years of age before the Arctic is ice-free in the summer. That is a rapid change on a planetary scale, with far-reaching consequences that scientists are just beginning to understand.' Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service

Fats in foods like potato chips and french fries make them nearly irresistible because they trigger natural marijuana-like chemicals in the body called endocannabinoids, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found. The researchers discovered that when rats tasted something fatty, cells in their upper gut started producing endocannabinoids, while sugars and proteins did not have this effect. How fats create, like, a buzz It starts on the tongue, where fats in food generate a signal that travels first to your brain, and then through a nerve bundle called the vagus to your intestines. There, the signal stimulates the production of endocannabinoids, which initiates a surge in cell signaling that prompts you to totally pig out - probably by initiating the release of digestive chemicals linked to hunger and satiety that compel us to eat more. And that leads to obesity, diabetes and cancer, the researchers said. But they suggest it might be possible to curb this process by obstructing endocannabinoid activity: for example, by using drugs that "clog" cannabinoid receptors. The trick: bypassing the brain to avoid creating anxiety and depression (which happens when endocannabinoid signaling is blocked in the brain). I'm guessing McDonald's won't be adding that drug to their fries. Ref.: Daniele Piomelli, et al., An endocannabinoid signal in the gut controls dietary fat intake, PNAS, 2011; in press

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

"Performing short cycle sprints three times a week could be enough to prevent and possibly treat type 2 diabetes, a study suggests. Scientists at the University of Bath asked volunteers to perform two 20-second cycle sprints on exercise bikes, three times per week. After six weeks, researchers in the university's department of health saw a 28% improvement in their insulin function."

" Dieses intelligente Rückstoßprinzip stand Forschern des Fraunhofer-Instituts für Produktionstechnik und Automatisierung IPA beim Entwickeln eines Unterwasserantriebs Pate. »Kraken nutzen diese Art der Fortbewegung hauptsächlich für eine plötzliche schnelle Flucht. Das System ist zwar einfach, aber effektiv. Die Oktopoden können damit über kurze Strecken enorm beschleunigen«, sagt Andreas Fischer, Ingenieur am IPA in Stuttgart. »Wir haben das Antriebsprinzip in unsere Unterwasseraktoren integriert: Vier elastische Kunststoffbälle mit einem mechanischen Innenleben pumpen Wasser und sorgen so für Vortrieb.«"

I read an interesting article this morning from the Burlington Free Press featuring the work of Josh Bongard, hired by the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of computer science. The article focused much of its attention on Bongard's self-aware robot, Black Starfish.

A new strain of mosquitoes in which females cannot fly may help curb the transmission of dengue fever, according to UC Irvine and British scientists. Great idea or frankensketter?

Whether used to clinch a guilty verdict or predict the end of a "CSI" episode, DNA evidence has given millions of people a sense of certainty -- but the outcomes of using DNA evidence have often been far from certain, according to David Kaye, Distinguished Professor of Law at Penn State.