MachineMachine /stream - tagged with research

It's time for science to move on from materialism

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:35:54 -0700

It's time for science to move on from materialism | Mark Vernon http://t.co/p65QfBe0

Rereading Darwin

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:06:23 -0700

The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.”) http://t.co/51DRe7oS #Darwin

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:24:04 -0700

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been…

Trials and Errors: The limits of reductionism & why science fails us

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 05:31:52 -0700

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.

Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:34:32 -0700

"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…

Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:35:04 -0700

Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

It Does Take a Village

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 04:37:58 -0700

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That Never Evolved. It may be the most important. As she demolished, in the first, the idol of an evolved passive femininity, and in the second, the serene, always giving maternal goddess, in her third synthetic work she takes on another cultural and biological ideal: the mother who goes it alone. In our once male-dominated vision of evolution, we had the lone brave man, the hunter with his spear, and the lone enduring woman nurturing her young beneath the African sun; they made a deal, the first social contract, exchanging the services each was suited to by genetic destiny.

Hrdy has not been alone in challenging this myth. A conference and book edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, although it was called Man the Hunter, showed that women brought in half or more of the food of hunter-gatherers by collecting vegetables, fruit, and nuts.3 This meant that, given the unpredictability of hunting success and the human need for plant foods, the primordial deal between the sexes was rather more complex than we thought. It also suggested that women had power in these societies; that men listened to them and decisions were made by consensus, not by male fiat as in more complex, hierarchical societies.

What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:03 -0700

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…

Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:53:26 -0700

"A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population." http://t.co/vrjY2W6V via @dsjkvf

Neanderthal Neuroscience

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:09:18 -0700

As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his colleagues managed to extract some fragments of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil–by coincidence, the very first Neanderthal discovered in 1857. The DNA was of a special sort. Along with the bulk of our genes, which are located in the nucleus of our cells, we also carry bits of DNA in jellybean-shaped structures called mitochondria. Since there are hundreds of mitochondria in each cell, it’s easier to grab fragments of…

Threshold science

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:51:34 -0700

Threshold science: How walking through a doorway increases forgetting : http://t.co/npVLfW8H

On Science Transfer

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:01:31 -0700

“Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before. Our modern system for generating novelty and prosperity has stretched to encompass the entire planet, growing more complex and expansive, so that now it seems to groan and shudder beneath its own weight. In its service, some things are falling apart: Non-renewable resources are profligately consumed, ecosystems disrupted, and social traditions steadily relinquished. There seems no way to stop or slow these processes without causing immense, cascading catastrophe. The only…

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:23:48 -0700

The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning. Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities.…

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:26:12 -0700

"What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for..."

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:01:00 -0700

“

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…

The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:31:52 -0700

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

Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:45:39 -0700

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…

Our Emergent Digital Future

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 04:32:30 -0700

What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear.

Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist. Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits.

However, trends tell us very little. It’s discontinuities that drive history. Everything seems fine and then boom! E-commerce comes along, then search engines, social media, smart phones and on and on. Much like the flood that set Noah on his…

Information Wants to be Consumed

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:00:18 -0700

Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal…

On Discovering Life

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:05:30 -0700

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…