Analysis Reveals Extent of DNA Repair Army
Also see: Cell Cycle Regulation and Mechanisms of DNA Repair:
Related: DNA Transcription Webcast - New Understanding of Human DNA
Webcast above: Speaking Science 2.0 by Matthew Nisbet, School of Communication, American University, and Chris Mooney, Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine, speak at the AIBS annual meeting, May 2007, in Washington DC. They discuss how to improve the transfer of science knowledge to the public (an important topic and one I am interested in). More on The American Institute of Biological Sciences conference: Evolutionary Biology and Human Health.
via: Framing Science
Curriki Global Education and Learning Community
Another promising looking effort, though they do need to improving the editing of content. They also need to add tools to make it easy to find the content others have found most beneficial. And they should improve the accessibility of the content - all of it should be available using a browser (now some content is presented only as zipped files, some are word documents…). 200 science and 150 math documents are available now including: Big Cats and Intro to Electricity . The site includes content hosted itself and links to content hosted on other sites.
Related: Open Access Education Materials - Online Mathematics Textbooks - Encyclopedia of Life - MIT for Free
Robots put the cool back in computer science (page deleted by CNN so I removed the link):
Outside groups have applauded the effort, too. “In fact, computing is a tool that can be used for virtually every application — from entertainment to medicine,” said Virginia Gold of the Association for Computing Machinery. “And the Scribbler helps show how pervasive computers are in everything.” The computing industry has a reason to be concerned about the future.
The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7,798 in fall 2006, according to the Computing Research Association. And the downward trend isn’t expected to reverse soon. The association says about 1 percent of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major, a 70 percent drop from the rate in 2000.
Related: Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science - Computer Science Revolution - Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - 2007 Draper Prize to Berners-Lee
In An Open Mouse, Carl Zimmer discusses the conflict between closed journals and those that support open access.
His post mentions the recent bad publicity Wiley received. It seems to me the Journals still don’t understand that their copyright of research results paid for by public funds are not going to continue. And that open access science is clearly the way of the future that their continued failure to deal with is increasing the odds monthly that they will find themselves on the outside of those practicing science in the 21st Century.
PLoS on the other hand recently hired Bora Zivkovic as PLoS ONE Online Community Manager. He will be great and continue to build PLoS into an organization supporting free and open science. I loved PLoS proactive action recounted by Bora, he posted that he was interested in the job:
Related: The Future of Scholarly Publication - Anger at Anti-Open Access PR
Interesting post on Keeping students interested in Computer Science by an 11th grader:
Very true. Engaging students, as with all teaching, is critical to making learning not just tolerable but fun.
Related: Electrical Engineering Student by college student - Inspire Students to Study Math and Science by another high school student - A Career in Computer Programming - Programming with Pictures - Want to be a Computer Game Programmer?
Chris Anderson continues his progress with the sub $1,000 autonomous flight vehicle (using lego mindstorms at the core). He has created a site to track the progress and provide information resources to others: DIY Drones. Very cool.
Related: The sub-$1,000 UAV Project - Lego Autopilot Project Update - Building minds by building robots - Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning
The technology involved here is worth thinking about. Even now, this was a rather costly experiment as these things go, and it’s worth a paper in a good journal. But a few years ago, needless to say, it would have been a borderline-insane idea, and a few years before that it would have been flatly impossible. A few years from now it’ll be routine, and a few years after that it probably won’t be done at all, having been superseded by something more elegant that no one’s come up with yet. But for now, we’re entering the age where wildly sequence-intensive experiments, many of which no one even bothered to think about before, will start to run.
Very interesting. He is exactly right that the technology advances continuing at an amazing pace allow for experiments we (and least I) can’t even imagine today to become common in just a few years. And the insights from those experiments will allow us to think of new experiments… Wonderful.
Related: How do antibiotics kill bacteria? - Drug Resistant Bacteria More Common - Statistics for Experimenters
Sandra Porter has posted a series of posts on finding scientific papers for free: A day in the life of an English physician - What’s the best way to find free scientific publications? - My new favorite method - one more experiment
via: Finding scientific papers for free
Related: Get research papers free - Open access science and engineering posts - Open Access Engineering Journals - Curious Cat Science and Engineering Search Engine
Superbug poses dire threat to Africa
He suspected multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR, believed at the time to be as bad as the disease could get. So he collected sputum from 45 patients and sent it off to a lab in Durban for cell culturing. (The only way to tell if a TB strain is drug-resistant is to grow cultures from a patient sample, zap it with the different drugs and see which, if any, fail to kill it.) The process takes six to eight weeks. “In that time, we more or less forgot about it,” Dr. Moll said. One of his two young men died.
But the phone call from the lab, when it eventually came, slammed the issue to the top of their agenda: Of the 45 samples, 10 were indeed drug-resistant. But they weren’t resistant to just one or two of the drugs used against TB. They were resistant to all six medications available for use in Tugela Ferry. In other words, there was nothing to cure that TB at all.
As we have discussed previously, antibiotic resistance is a huge problem today and especially looming in the future. Perhaps we will find new fantanstic cures but the failure to take sensible action puts us at great risk.
Related: Deadly TB Strain is Spreading, WHO Warns - CDC Urges Increased Effort to Reduce Drug-Resistant Infections - Entirely New Antibiotic Developed
More research on feeding your newborn neurons, New Neurons in Old Brains Exhibit Babylike Plasticity:
The team found that there is a two-week window, or critical period, about a month after these new cells hatch during which they act like the neurons of a newborn baby. The researchers cued the new cells with a pattern of electrical activation that mimics the sequence that takes place in the brain of a mouse as it learns about a special spot (such as a corner in its cage where it may receive food or a shock). During this time, the cell synapses (connections that allow neurons to communicate with each other) that are artificially stimulated become stronger.
Related: No Sleep, No New Brain Cells - How The Brain Rewires Itself
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High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers (pdf) by Urs Hoelzle and Bill Weihl - Google:
Related: Cost of Powering Your PC - Engineers Save Energy - Electricity Conservation Works Best - Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel
Female Sharks Can Reproduce Alone, Researchers Find
Mahmood Shivji — Nova Southeastern’s Guy Harvey Research Institute director and one of the paper’s authors — said that he and his colleagues determined that a byproduct formed when sharks produce eggs, known as a sister polar body, had fused with an unfertilized egg to produce the baby shark, whose DNA had only half as much genetic variability as the mother.
Related: Sex and the Seahorse - 50 New Species Found in Indonesia Reefs - Arctic Sharks - Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago
But the software, currently readable to users in plain old English (a major drawback for many faculty who of course teach programming in standard computer languages like Java and C++), is potentially poised to penetrate far more colleges in 2008, when Alice 3.0 comes out in Java — featuring, this time around, sophisticated graphics, made available free by Electronic Arts Inc., from “The Sims,” the best-selling PC video game of all time. (And significantly, Pausch adds, one of the few games more popular with girls than boys. Computer science, he notes drily, has the unfortunate distinction of being the only discipline in the sciences to actually face declining female enrollments percentage-wise in the last 25 years).
Interesting. Related: Computer Science Education - A Career in Computer Programming - Microsoft Wants More Engineering Students - So You want to be a Computer Game Programmer? - software development posts on our management blog
Remote-Controlled Omnidirectional Submarines:
Fun looking toy. Via: Remote-Controlled Submarines. Related: Science and Engineering Gadgets and Gifts - Lego Autopilot Project Update - Underwater Robots Collaborate
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