In 1971 Wilson published his second major synthesis, The Insect Societies, which formulated the existing knowledge of the behavior of ants, social bees, social wasps, and termites, on a foundation of population biology. In it he introduced the concept of a new discipline of sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of social behavior in all kinds of organisms. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which extended the subject to vertebrates and united it more closely to evolutionary biology. The foundational discoveries of sociobiology are generally recognized to be the analysis of animal communication and division of labor, in which Wilson played a principal role, and the genetic theory of the origin of social behavior, which he helped to promote and apply in his 1971 and 1975 syntheses. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was later ranked in a poll of the officers and fellows of the international Animal Behaviour Society as the most important book on animal behavior of all time, and is regarded today as the founding text of sociobiology and its offshoot, evolutionary psychology.

Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
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At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened. “This is a specific type of learning, called Hebbian learning,” says Warwick, “where, by doing something habitually, you get better at doing it.”
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“It’s fun just looking at it as a robot life form, but I think it may also contribute to a better understanding of how our brain works,” he says. Studying the ways in which his robot learns and stores memories in its brain may provide new insights into neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

I firmly believe that it is impossible to innovate effectively without a clear understanding of the context and usage of your final innovation. Ideally, I like to “go to gemba“, otherwise known as the place where the problem exists, so I can dig for tacit knowledge and observe unconscious behaviours.
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I didn’t disgrace myself and I’ve been invited back for another day or so. What did I learn that I didn’t know before? The key things I learnt were:

• the guide wire isn’t just a means of steering the catheter into place as I thought. It is a functional tool in it’s own right
• Feel is really critical to the cardiologist
• There is a huge benefit in speeding up procedures in terms of patient wellbeing and lab efficiency
• Current catheter systems lack the level of detection capability and controllability needed for some more complex PCIs (Percutaneous Cardiac Interventions)

The whole experience reminded me that in terms of innovation getting to gemba is critical. When was the last time you saw your products in use up-close and personal?

New data from a large federal study have reignited a debate over the effectiveness of long-term drug treatment of children with hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder, and have drawn accusations that some members of the research team have sought to play down evidence that medications do little good beyond 24 months. The study also indicated that long-term use of the drugs can stunt children’s growth.
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One principal scientist in the study, psychologist William Pelham, said that the most obvious interpretation of the data is that the medications are useful in the short term but ineffective over longer periods but added that his colleagues had repeatedly sought to explain away evidence that challenged the long-term usefulness of medication. When their explanations failed to hold up, they reached for new ones, Pelham said.
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Peter Jensen, one of Pelham’s fellow researchers, responded that Pelham was biased against the use of drugs and was substituting his personal opinion for science.

Jensen said Pelham was the only member of the team of researchers who took away “the silly message” that the study raised questions about the long-term utility of drugs, but interviews and e-mails show that Pelham was not alone.
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In a telephone interview, Jensen denied that the researchers had misled the public, pointing out that some children getting the drugs did do better over the long term. Looking at overall results was not as useful as studying how particular groups of children fared, he said.

Jensen and another co-author, L. Eugene Arnold at Ohio State University, who are both psychiatrists, emphasized the importance of individualizing treatment — and warned parents against abruptly terminating drug therapy.

The subgroup analysis found that children in homes that were socially and economically stable did the same in the long term with or without medication. Children from troubled or deprived backgrounds slid backward as soon as the intensive therapy stopped and they went back to their communities. About one-third — those with the least impairment to begin with — continued to improve over the long term.

Jensen and co-author Benedetto Vitiello at the NIMH said drugs may not have shown an overall long-term benefit because the quality of routine care that children received may have been inferior to the care they got during the initial part of the study. Jensen said the take-home message is that community care needs improvement.

The most numerous, and certainly the most high-profile, service robots in Japan are for entertainment. Ever since 2000 when Honda amazed the world with its walking humanoid Asimo, other Japanese companies have been fast on their heels. Notable examples include Mitsubishi’s lemon yellow home helper Wakamaru, Toyota’s trumpet-playing humanoid, and Murata Manufacturing’s bicycle-riding robot. Although such impressive PR robots are too expensive to sell, Japan also has popular home entertainment robots. The best known to date is Sony’s robot pooch Aibo, which was produced between 1999 and 2006.
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Another potential role for service robots is dealing with Japan’s imminent demographic crisis. A low birthrate and unrivalled longevity mean the number of elderly Japanese will increase dramatically over the coming decades. In the absence of mass immigration (which Japan has been keen to avoid) a severe shortage of caregivers seems inevitable. Some people believe robots are the answer. Takanori Shibata, a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, says that robot caregivers can be divided into physical service and mental service robots. The former are designed to help with tasks such as washing or carrying elderly people, although given the limitations of current technology, not to mention safety concerns, they are still quite a long way from commercialization.

Mental service robots on the other hand are already here. One of the best known is Paro, an interactive robot seal designed by Shibata himself. The sophisticated robot can remember its name and change its behavior depending on how it is treated. It has been extensively tested in homes for elderly people and in hospitals. In 2002 the Guinness Book of Records named Paro as “the world’s most therapeutic robot.” The robot reminds patients of the pets or children they once cared for, says Shibata. “Paro is a kind of trigger to provoke something in the mind of the owner,” he suggests. About 1,000 of the robots, which cost about 3,000 dollars, have been produced since 2004. Overseas sales will begin shortly.

Conducted by teams at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, UW-Madison and the J. Craig Venter Institute, the work to sequence and analyze the cold virus genomes lays a foundation for understanding the virus, its evolution and three-dimensional structure and, most importantly, for exposing vulnerabilities that could lead to the first effective cold remedies.

“We’ve had bits and pieces of these things for a long time,” says Ann Palmenberg, of UW-Madison’s Institute for Molecular Virology and the lead author of the new study. “Now, we have the full genome sequences and we can put them into evolutionary perspective.”

As its name implies, the common cold is an inescapable, highly contagious pathogen. Humans are constantly exposed to cold viruses, and each year adults may endure two to four infections, while schoolchildren can catch as many as 10 colds.

“We know a lot about the common cold virus,” Palmenberg explains, “but we didn’t know how their genomes encoded all that information. Now we do, and all kinds of new things are falling out.”
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The newly sequenced viruses also show, says Palmenberg, why it is unlikely we will ever have an effective, all-purpose cold vaccine: The existing reservoir of viruses worldwide is huge and, according to the new study, they have a tendency to swap genetic sequences when cells are infected by more than one virus, a phenomenon that can lead to new virus strains and clinical manifestations.
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The ability of different cold virus strains to swap genes and make entirely new strains was thought to be impossible, notes Claire M. Fraser-Liggett, a co-author of the new study and director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “There is the possibility that this could lead to the emergence of a new rhinovirus strain with fairly dramatic properties,” says Fraser-Liggett.

a survey our team conducted in the spring of 2007 revealed that a fourth of U.S. beekeepers had suffered similar losses and that more than 30 percent of all colonies had died. The next winter the die-off resumed and expanded, hitting 36 percent of U.S. beekeepers. Reports of large losses also surfaced from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe and other regions. More recent data are not available yet, but some beekeepers say they have seen their colonies collapse this winter, too.
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Our collaboration has ruled out many potential causes for CCD and found many possible contributing factors. But no single culprit has been identified. Bees suffering from CCD tend to be infested with multiple pathogens, including a newly discovered virus, but these infections seem secondary or opportunistic much the way pneumonia kills a patient with AIDS. The picture now emerging is of a complex condition that can be triggered by different combinations of causes. There may be no easy remedy to CCD. It may require taking better care of the environment and making long-term changes to our beekeeping and agricultural practices.

1410 men would need to be screened to prevent one death. For each death prevented, 48 people would need to be treated: and prostate cancer treatment has a high risk of very serious side effects like impotence and incontinence. These figures are not hard to find: they are in the summary of the research paper.

For complex risk decisions like screening, it has been shown in three separate studies that patients, doctors, and NHS purchasing panels make more rational decisions about treatments and screening programmes when they are given the figures as real numbers, as I did above, instead of percentages. I’m not saying that PSA screening is either good or bad: I am saying that people deserve the figures in the clearest form possible so they can make their own mind up.
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So newspapers ignore one half of the evidence, and they fail to explain the other half properly.
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They can also link directly and transparently to scientific papers, which mainstream media still refuses to do. Journalists insist that we need professionals to mediate and explain science. From today’s story, their self belief seems truly laughable.

The PSA blood test, which millions of men undergo each year, did not lower the death toll from the disease in the first decade of a U.S. government-funded study involving more than 76,000 men, researchers reported yesterday. The second study, released simultaneously, was a European trial involving more than 162,000 men that did find fewer deaths among those tested. But the reduction was relatively modest and the study showed that the tests resulted in a large number of men undergoing needless, often harmful treatment.