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"People swap bacteria all the time-through sneezes and coughs, through hugs and sex, or through touching the same surfaces. Then there are people who swap bacteria because a doctor deliberately transplants faeces from one into the other. This isn't a bizarre medical perversion. It's usually a life-saving gambit. Faecal transplants-which are exactly what they sound like-are used to treat people who suffer from intense diarrhoea following rounds of antibiotics. The goal is simple: recalibrate the beneficial bacteria in a person's gut to fight off the ones that are causing them harm."

"According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website: "Ricin works by getting inside the cells of a person's body and preventing the cells from making the proteins they need. Without the proteins, cells die... Death from ricin poisoning could take place within 36 to 72 hours of exposure, depending on the route of exposure (inhalation, ingestion, or injection) and the dose received."

@tristanharris "How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist" #attentioneconomy #AufmerksamkeitsOekonomie

"For 20 years, researchers have reported a potential link between gum disease and atherosclerotic heart disease from hardening of the arteries or stroke. "The message sent out by some in health-care professions, that heart attack and stroke are directly linked to gum disease, can distort the facts, alarm patients and perhaps shift the focus on prevention away from well-known risk factors for these diseases," said Dr. Peter Lockhart, a professor and chair of oral medicine at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C. Lockhart wrote the heart group's new position statement in the journal Circulation. The statement was prepared after a three-year analysis of about 600 studies by an expert panel led by a dentist and a cardiologist."

SETILive is taking the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) directly to you by presenting radio frequency signals LIVE from the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) while it's pointed at stars that, based on Kepler exoplanet discoveries, have the best chances of being home to an alien civilization. We'll also be putting you "in the loop" where if enough of you see a potential extraterrestrial (ET) signal in the same data, then within minutes, the ATA will be interrupted and sent back to take a second look. The data you see will be from frequencies where human-made Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) crowds them and we believe the human eye will have a better chance than SETI's computer algorithms to find ET signals there.

Open Economics Working Group is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual and Property Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge. Its membership consists of leading academics and researchers, public and private sector economists, representatives from national and international public bodies and other experts from around the world.

Come work with us Interested in working with researchers from different disciplines within the Harvard, MIT and Broad community and an unique opportunity to participate in world-class research to make an impact on human health? Come work with us! We are looking for a computational biologists to handle data from a wide variety of experimental methods, focusing on next-gen sequencing technologies. Keep Reading...  SCDE is live The Stem Cell Discovery Engine (SCDE) is an integrated platform that allows users to consistently describe, share and compare cancer and tissue stem cell data. It is made up of an online database of curated experiments coupled to a customized instance of the Galaxy analysis engine with tools for gene list manipulation and molecular profile comparisons. The SCDE currently contains more than 50 stem cell-related experiments. Each has been manually curated and encoded using the ISA-Tab standard to ensure the quality of the data and its annotation. Keep Reading...  The Center for Health Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health provides consults to researchers for the management, integration and contextual analysis of biological high-throughput data. We are a member of the Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics, the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core at the Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Genetics & Bioinformatics Consulting group for Harvard Catalyst and work closely with our colleagues in the Department of Biostatistics and the Program in Quantitative Genomics to act as a single point of contact for computational biology,

It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.  From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.  Even more so, many of them tell us that From the Overview perspective, all of this seems imminently achievable, if only more people could ha

"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."

900 years of international history from one source. Gale Digital Collections has changed the nature of research forever by providing a wealth of rare, formerly inaccessible historical content from the world's most prestigious libraries.

Try over 600 free online courses from The Open University. Available from introductory to advanced level, each takes between 1 and 50 hours to study. Complete activities to assess your progress and compare your thoughts with sample answers.

"New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest - a 42% increase on average. The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism - withdrawal into one's own inner world. The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment. "

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

"A study conducted by researchers at cancer centers across the US has found a link between omega-3 fatty acids and an increased risk of prostate cancer. Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish including salmon, trout, and fresh tuna, and in fish oil supplements. The study, published online July 10 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids in some of the men enrolled in the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) of more than 35,000 men over age 50 in the US, Puerto Rico, and Canada. The study did not collect information on the men's diets. Therefore, it's not clear whether the omega-3 fatty acids in their blood came from food or from supplements."

"If you're here, you either are interested in how to use Web 2.0 tools for science, or attended one of the Social Networking for Scientists workshops from Christie Wilcox. This wiki is a gathering place for anyone with a passion and interest in science communication and workshop attendees from across the country so that everyone can continue to learn about the topic as well as network with one another. "

The Sociable Machines Project develops an expressive anthropomorphic robot called Kismet that engages people in natural and expressive face-to-face interaction. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolution, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver and to learn from them, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges.

"MIT-based researchers and instructors Marcelo Coelho and Skylar Tibbits teamed up to tackle this very problem. Working under a grant from Ars Electronica, the pair conceived of a whole new way to do 3-D printing. Hyperform is a new strategy for designing and printing large objects irrespective of a printer's bed size. So not only can you print out that chair at home, you can also print a table, bed frame, and everything else you need to furnish a bedroom. The solution is breathtakingly simple. By merely folding the object you want to print, you can jig it to fit into a small-scale printer. In Tibbits and Coelho's project, the object is rendered in 1-D--a line--and endlessly folded into a space-filling curve proportioned to the printer's cubic dimensions. (The designers partnered with Formlabs and iterated the process using a Form 1 tabletop printer.) When the object is exhumed from the printer bed, it doesn't at all resemble its final shape. Rather, it's a dense cluster of thin but sturdy polymer links packaged in a three-dimensional puzzle that can be intuitively assembled"

"The informatics portal io-port.net offers fast and convenient access to about more than two million publications in informatics and related subject areas from all over the world. All information, which up to then had been stored in various data sources, has been consolidated and is now available from one source. All steps required for information retrieval are available via an easy-to-use, powerful interface."

"So far the treatment, known as faecal transplant, has been tested only on a drug resistant form of the bowel disease caused by the bacterium clostridium difficile. Antibiotics are unreliable against the superbug, but the transplant is 95% successful, saving patients from constant stomach cramps and chronic diarrhoea. "It sounds radical but it makes a lot of sense," said Seppelt on Thursday at a gathering of more than 4,000 Australasian anaesthetists and surgeons. "Usually patients are sufficiently miserable to go ahead, often using a donation from a relative." Healthy humans have about 100 times more bacteria cells in their gut than their own cells."

One of the most complete early human skulls yet found suggests that what scientists thought were three hominin species may in fact be one. This controversial claim comes from a comparison between the anatomical features of a 1.8-million-year-old fossil skull with those of four other skulls from the same excavation site at Dmanisi, Georgia. The wide variability in their features suggests that Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, the species so far identified as existing worldwide in that era, might represent a single species.