Förvillelser

Synthetic Biology: Engineering Open-Source Software with DNA

Paralysed woman moves robot with her mind

(Source: nature.com)

cosmonova:

TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS

“The scientists by large know more liberal arts, than the science known by liberal artists and that needs to change. If you go to a science cocktail party and someone talks about Shakespeare no one is gonna say “Oh I was never good at Shakespeare! I was terrible in nouns and verbs!” No, you’ll never hear that. But if you go to a liberal art party, an artists party, and someone start talking about math it’s all “Oh I was never good at math, I hated math” and they all chuckle and all agree, and all like sip the next sip of champagne and go on talking about the art and that’s somehow ok. No that’s not ok.”

—

Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

I agree. But it really makes me sad when I hear scientists saying that literature is useless because it’s all about unreal stories, or that art in general is meaningless because is subjective. It’s not ok this either.

(via scipsy)

the inner life inside a human cell

…

Harvard University selected XVIVO to develop an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This award winning piece was the first topic in a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvards educational website BioVisions at Harvard.

Test Tube Yeast Evolve Multicellularity

By watching evolution in progress, scientists reveal key developments in the evolution of complex life and put evolutionary theories to the test

Har inte hunnit läsa artikeln själv än men verkar intressant.

fibodaleo:

I should say it is the most complicated photograph I have ever made. It shows position of the Sun on the sky in the same time of a day during one year…

Analemma - a trace of the annual movement of the Sun on the sky - is well known among experts of sun-dials and old Earth’s globes as a diagram of change of seasons and an equation of time. Between August 30th 1998 and August 19th 1999 I have photographed the Sun 36 times on a single frame of 60-mm film. The pictures were taken exactly at 5:45 UT (Universal time) of every tenth day. Previously, the position of the Sun on the sky was calculated with computer as well as optimal moments of time for taking each of the exposures. However, my success was strongly limited by the weather. Nobody can guarantee fine weather every tenth day even for a few minutes. Approximately, there are 120-170 sunny days a year in Crimea. That made me sure that my aim could be achieved. To do the job, the camera must stay fixed during 12 months. It was difficult to find such a place where the camera would be safe.

Source

(Source: chillybill3)

Large Hadron Collider

“We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.”

—

Who You Are by David Brooks

Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35 percent of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65 percent of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads “Limit 12 per customer.”

(via scipsy)

(via scipsy)

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 was awarded “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae” with one half to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess.

(Source: news.ycombinator.com)

13-Year-Old Makes A Solar Breakthrough With Fibonacci Sequence

“The tree design takes up less room than flat-panel arrays and works in spots that don’t have a full southern view. It collects more sunlight in winter. Shade and bad weather like snow don’t hurt it because the panels are not flat. It even looks nicer because it looks like a tree. A design like this may work better in urban areas where space and direct sunlight can be hard to find.”

matthen:

Liquid water on the surface of Mars! NASA has just announced news that it has observed the phenomenon shown above. These dark surface flows in the Southern hemispheres seem to be a volatile substance, and the leading hypothesis is that it is heavily salty liquid water. [NASA TV] [more]

Connectomics

Connectomics is a high-throughput application of neural imaging and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of maps of the multitude of neural connections in a nervous system. The principal focus of such a project is the brain, although any neural connections could theoretically be mapped by connectomics, including, for example, neuromuscular junctions. The map produced by such a project is called a connectome.

Naturenews: Computational science: ...Error…why scientific programming does not compute.

Researchers are spending more and more time writing computer software to model biological structures, simulate the early evolution of the Universe and analyse past climate data, among other topics. But programming experts have little faith that most scientists are up to the task.

A quarter of a century ago, most of the computing work done by scientists was relatively straightforward. But as computers and programming tools have grown more complex, scientists have hit a “steep learning curve”, says James Hack, director of the US National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “The level of effort and skills needed to keep up aren’t in the wheelhouse of the average scientist.”

Inte förvånad.

RNA duplicating RNA, a step closer to the origin of life