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Human Proteinpedia is a community portal for sharing and integration of human protein data. It allows research laboratories to contribute and maintain protein annotations. Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) integrates data, that is deposited in Human Proteinpedia along with the existing literature curated information in the context of an individual protein. All the public data contributed to Human Proteinpedia can be queried, viewed and downloaded.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this endeavor. As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

Essays and research supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.

10 Pillars of Knowledge is a systematic map of human knowledge. It presents, at a glance, the structure of knowledge and the meaningful relations among the main fields. Human knowledge is composed of 10 pillars: Foundations, Supernatural, Matter and Energy, Space and Earth, Non-Human Organisms, Body and Mind, Society, Thought and Art, Technology, History

An international research consortium has been formed to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The 1000 Genomes Project will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world. The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week. "It's not that much until you put it together with other legos." He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks. But this kind of "human scale" analysis is no longer feasible in an age when automated laboratory processes generate vast amounts of information faster than the human mind can process it. "For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks. He says a scientist might once have analysed the impact of one drug on one gene, but now pipetting robots are capable of analysing 25,000 genes at a time. "Most of the research says the smartest of us can handle five or six independent variables at once - not 25,000," he says

Semantic web atlas of postgenomic knowledge about human and mouse

Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Sensemaking has been said to involve changes in cognitive representations during a human information processing task. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities, as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans. Connected visual and semantic representations provide perspective to support users involved in collection sensemaking tasks. A zoomable map organizes images based on location at varying scales. Multiscale clusters based on zoom level organize images associated with events. The clusters afford contextualized thumbnail browsing and also maintain uniform information density on the map. Metadata enhances context and memory in the process of collection sensemaking.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

The focus of this month's issue moves from the individual to the community. Sustainable development requires communities in which people consciously and continuously attempt to balance individual self-interest with the common good. Surely, this is not the kind of ethos that induced the current financial crisis that, starting in New York, has already spread to all regions of the world. It is a financial pandemic, fueled by a greed virus that makes governments willing to sink trillions of dollars into failed financial institutions at the expense of millions of human beings that lack the resources to meet the most basic human needs.

Biophysical economics is a basis for economic analysis that acknowledges, analyzes and uses the biological and physical (as opposed to social) properties, structures and processes of real economic systems as its conceptual base and fundamental model. It acknowledges that the basis for nearly all wealth is nature, and views most human economic activity as a means to increase (directly or indirectly) the exploitation of nature to generate more wealth. As such, it focuses on the structure and function of real economies from an energy and material perspective, but often considers the relation of this structure and function to human welfare and to the money (i.e. dollar) flows that tend to go in the opposite direction to energy (Odum 1972).

"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive."

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

This paper introduces the concept of phatic technology and analyses its role in modern society. A phatic technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop, and maintain human relationships. The primary function of this type of technology is to create a social context: its users form a social community with a collection of interactional goals, which may be relevant to all human interchanges in that social context.

Crosswalks are documents that map metadata elements between different metadata standards. The crosswalk may be presented as a document for humans to read, in which case the crosswalking process must be performed by humans who are referencing the document. Alternatively, a crosswalk document may be expressed in such a way that a computer can automatically perform a mapping from one metadata standard to another.

Patacritism is a project to develop interpretive tools for online humanities.

Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics

Humanities, arts, science, and technology advanced collaboratory

"[...] Mazzagatti calls this new data structure the Triadic Continuum, in honor of the theories and writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the least well-known scientific geniuses of the late 19th century. Peirce, who is recognized as the father of pragmatism, is also known for his work in semiotics, the study of thought signs. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced"

I quote: "Mazzagatti continued research into how Peirce's sign theory could be adapted to create a logical structure composed of signs that could be used in computers. Using Peirce's theoretical writings on how thought signs are organized into the structure of the human brain, Mazzagatti extrapolated a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced. "