Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos.

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.

"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

""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."

"Over the last 10 years, MIT biologist Leonard Guarente and other researchers have demonstrated that very-low-calorie diets provoke a comprehensive physiological response, which promotes survival due to a set of proteins called sirtuins. A new report by Guarente published online in Cell has now demonstrated that sirtuins may also have a key part in the psychological response to dietary restriction. "

""It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others." - M.F.K. Fisher Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we're no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach - a very stretchy container - we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we'll still polish it off. And then we'll go have dessert."

The scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 and graphene - the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material - is considered as having the potential to revolutionise materials science.

"Leah Pyter: Well basically what we know is that patients with cancer have a higher likelihood of also developing depression at some point in their disease progression, so whether that occurred before and is predisposing them to cancer, or it's due to the tumours themselves, or other aspects of having the disease, we don't know. We were only studying right now whether the cancer itself can cause depression. Chris Smith: How could a tumour trigger depression, because a tumour can occur anywhere in the body, therefore at the remote sites in the brain, so how could it trigger changes in brain activity? Leah Pyter: Sure, well what we hypothesized was that the tumours themselves can produce cytokines which has been shown before. Chris Smith: These are inflammatory chemicals that drive the immune system? Leah Pyter: Right, exactly! And there is also a pile of research on how cytokines can access the brain specifically regions of the brain that are associated with depression and anxiety and emotional behaviours, and they can access the brain both tumourally through the blood, or neurally through the vegas nerves. "

"In humans, physical stimulation, such as massage therapy, reduces stress and has demonstrable health benefits. Grooming in primates may have similar effects but it remains unclear whether the positive effects are due to physical contact or to its social value. Here we show that physical stimulation reduces stress in a coral reef fish, the surgeonfish Ctenochaetus striatus. These fish regularly visit cleaner wrasses Labroides dimidiatus to have ectoparasites removed. The cleanerfish influences client decisions by physically touching the surgeonfish with its pectoral and pelvic fins, a behaviour known as tactile stimulation. We simulated this behaviour by exposing surgeonfish to mechanically moving cleanerfish models. Surgeonfish had significantly lower levels of cortisol when stimulated by moving models compared with controls with access to stationary models. Our results show that physical contact alone, without a social aspect, is enough to produce fitness-enhancing benefits, a situation so far only demonstrated in humans"

Portal is a directory of Computer Science pages at Wikiversity. This directory page provides links to Computer Science learning resources that have been developed by the various Wikiversity Computer Science content development projects. The main content development project is the School of Computer Science. This portal features exciting examples of Computer Science learning resources. Wikiversity participants who are interested in Computer Science are invited to create and participate in learning projects and learning resources and help organize them by developing this portal. We're just starting, but we already have some good materials. The Computer Science Portal serves to provide quick access to everything in the Computer Science category.

"If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford have given M13 a bit of a makeover. The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes - its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands - to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or "Bi-Fi." Their findings were published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of Biological Engineering."

The oldest big cat fossils ever found - from a previously unknown species "similar to a snow leopard" - have been unearthed in the Himalayas. The skull fragments of the newly-named Panthera blytheae have been dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old. Their discovery in Tibet supports the theory that big cats evolved in central Asia - not Africa - and spread outward.

"Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia" (specifically, "emotional synesthesia"). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability."

3,700 year-old store room held 2,000 liters of strong, sweet wine. Archaeologists have unearthed what may be the oldest -- and largest -- ancient wine cellar in the Near East, containing forty jars, each of which would have held fifty liters of strong, sweet wine. The cellar was discovered in the ruined palace of a sprawling Canaanite city in northern Israel, called Tel Kabri. The site dates to about 1,700 B.C. and isn't far from many of Israel's modern-day wineries.

"The Science of Dreams and Why We Have Nightmares by Maria Popova The psychology of our built-in nocturnal therapy."

"(PhysOrg.com) -- "Carbon nanotubes have a lot of really nice properties that make them good for photonics," Laurent Vivien tells PhysOrg.com. Ever since the discovery that carbon nanotubes have photoluminescence when encapsulated in micelle surfactant, Vivien points out, there has been interest in pursuing them for use in nanophotonics, and in microelectronics. "

"THE precursor of life may have learned how to copy itself thanks to simple convection at the bottom of the ocean. Lab experiments reveal how DNA replication could have occurred in tiny pores around undersea vents." "To test this theory, Mast and Braun put these ingredients into tubes 1.5 millimetres long. They used a laser to heat one side of the water and create thermal convection. Sure enough, they found that the DNA doubled every 50 seconds (Physical Review Letters, vol 104, p 188102)."

Exquisite measurements of the radiation left over from the big bang led us to believe that we could work out the curvature of the universe to within a few per cent. In doing so, we have determined how much energy the universe contains and that most of it is in an exotic form called dark energy, which is driving the expansion of space. However, recent discoveries have left me wondering if these claims were premature. As we learn more about dark energy and its effect on the expansion of space and time, we find that dark energy and the shape, or geometry, of the universe are worryingly intertwined.

There have been disastrous flash floods in the US, thankfully warning systems have lowered the death tolls. But a flash flood can happen in an instant killing many