MachineMachine /stream - tagged with biology http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Nature, nurture and liberal values http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses ]]> Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:35:21 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ a floating fire ant raft is pushed down on the surface of water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bdry7_5qck&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:49:57 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bdry7_5qck&feature=youtube_gdata What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011 http://www.livescience.com/17559-human-origins-2011-discoveries.html/what-we-learned-about-our-human-ancestors-in-2011-human-origins-amp-ancestor-of-human-lineage-neanderthals-amp-denisovans-livescience What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011 http://t.co/rbvI8Gto ]]> Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:53:33 -0700 http://www.livescience.com/17559-human-origins-2011-discoveries.html/what-we-learned-about-our-human-ancestors-in-2011-human-origins-amp-ancestor-of-human-lineage-neanderthals-amp-denisovans-livescience Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html "I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from… ]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:34:32 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of… ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:50:14 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis? http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically) but are quiescent until adulthood - during metamorphosis, these neurons put on their game face and start to do real work in adulthood. B) Some neurons are useful in larval life and not in adult life, and basically die during metamorphosis. C) Some neurons are useful in both larval and adult life, but do different things - so they basically retract their projections during metamorphosis and make new ones… ]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:03 -0700 http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/29/0015216/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication-slashdot "A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population." http://t.co/vrjY2W6V via @dsjkvf ]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:53:26 -0700 http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/29/0015216/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication-slashdot Is mental time travel what makes us human? http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human Evolution http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/features/the-roots-of-religion Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page magnum opus that delves deep into the roots of humankind's encounter with mystery and the search for meaning. Underwritten in part by funding from the John Templeton Foundation, Bellah's book, out this month from Harvard University Press, has been described as “the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. It is a page-turner of a bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global… ]]> Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:17:49 -0700 http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/features/the-roots-of-religion "What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for..." http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/10199710371 “

What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? - a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at all costs expel, excise, reject? Or something like a parasite, with which we must negotiate a contract of symbiosis? I lean toward the second solution, as life itself does. l’m even willing to bet that in the future the best treatment for cancer will switch from eliminating it to a method that will profit from its dynamism.

Why? Because, objectively, we have… ]]> Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:01:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/10199710371 The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob http://www.librarything.com/work/book/77592602/the-logic-of-life-peregrine-books-by-francois-jacob

Penguin Books Ltd (1989), Edition: New Ed, Paperback, 448 pages

]]> Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:31:52 -0700 http://www.librarything.com/work/book/77592602/the-logic-of-life-peregrine-books-by-francois-jacob Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110809/full/476136a.html By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago. Montgomery Slatkin and Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, theoretical geneticists from the University of California, Berkeley, presented the finding at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Kyoto, Japan, held on 26–30 July.
Slatkin says that their result agrees with another study presented at the meeting that came from the group of David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was involved in sequencing both the… ]]> Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:45:39 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110809/full/476136a.html On Discovering Life http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_discovering_life/ There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The roll call of early pioneers and prospectors is notable, but short. Fortunately, increasing numbers of researchers are now re-entering this fertile frontier.

The open secret of this emerging frontier is that we do not have a fundamental definition or understanding of life. Similarly, we do not understand life’s origins, how life emerges from chemistry. We do know that the chemistry of life on Earth, or “Terran” biochemistry… ]]> Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:05:30 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_discovering_life/ New York - Empire of Evolution http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory. White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and… ]]> Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:55:44 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all What's human? What's animal? And what of the biology in between? http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how to keep pace with developments in the biosciences. It can justly be said that politics and regulation have not dealt well with our newfound capacities for muddying the boundaries between us and other species. And yet the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in bioscientific techniques that increasingly call into question what it means to be human. Take the human genome project: many of us may have… ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:20:18 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article Regulations proposed for animal–human chimaeras http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110721/full/475438a.html The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with a functioning pancreas composed entirely of rat cells. So might it soon be possible to create a monkey with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? And would it think like a human?

Such an animal might be useful to researchers studying human cognition or human-specific pathogens. But it would be ethically unacceptable and should be banned, argues a government-commissioned report from the UK Academy of Medical… ]]> Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:30:09 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110721/full/475438a.html A Home Before the End of the World http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-home-before-the-end-of-the-world/26568/ Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria… ]]> Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:11:54 -0700 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-home-before-the-end-of-the-world/26568/ Being human http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QItJVagE Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1QItDnVwR
What is human nature? A biologist might see it like this: humans are animals and, like all animals, consist mostly of a digestive tract into which they relentlessly stuff other organisms – whether animal or vegetable, pot-roasted or raw – in order to fuel their attempts to reproduce yet more such insatiable, self-replicating omnivores. The fundamentals of human nature, therefore, are… ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2011 08:55:05 -0700 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5be66ede-9b48-11e0-a254-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QItJVagE Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept Interview with Nick Bostrom

Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small.

If they have not ended human history until now, they are unlikely to have that effect in the near future. So the risks we should really worry about come from new developments. They introduce new factors with a lot of statistical uncertainty, and we cannot be confident that their risks are manageable. The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:21:17 -0700 http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept The Things, by Peter Watts http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:13:19 -0700 http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/