Posts for November, 2009
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
While not strictly about agricultural biodiversity (although much more could be made of agrobiodiversity in this realm) Scidev.net draws attention to an editorial in The Lancet. In the run up to (yet another) High Level Summit — this time on Food Security — next week, Scidev.net reports The Lancet’s view that:
Poor terminology adds [...]
Dr Shock MD PhD
If your like me, having 5 e-mail accounts, a couple of websites, wikis, several calendars and address books it’s hard to keep everything in sync. Cloud computing or living in the Cloud has it’s benefits. Cloud Computing refers to Internet-centric software and services that are outsourced to someone else and in this [...]
bjoern.brembs.net
Björn Brembs
Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies – http://www.citeulike.org/user…
17 hours ago
from CiteULike: brembs's library
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Nature, Vol. 462, No. 7269. (05 November 2009), pp. 51-57.
Explanations of cooperation between non-kin in animal societies often suggest that individuals exchange resources or services and that cooperation is maintained by reciprocity. But do cooperative interactions between unrelated individuals in [...]
Mystery Rays from Outer Space
TRegs infiltrate into a tumor
One of the reasons the immune system doesn’t destroy tumors is the presence of regulatory T cells (TRegs) that actively shut down the anti-tumor response. For once, there’s a little bit of encouraging news on that front.
TRegs are normal parts of the immune system. They actively prevent [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Nigel Maxted has just sent a brief personal take on the recent Kew 250th anniversary celebrations to the Crop Wild Relatives discussion group. Here’s a snippet:
Personally I felt the audience was very receptive to the use and need for CWR conservation, but in my view far too many talks outside of the Plant [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
I’ve just discovered this bit of inanity, a month or so late. Queen’s University Belfast has a slice of a €1 million study known as the Badana project, to “develop new procedures to incorporate by-products from banana plantations in the Canary Islands into the production of rotationally moulded plastics”. Why? Because:
Once the fruit [...]
Dr Shock MD PhD
patients with depression often complain of difficulty getting to sleep, frequent awakenings during the night, early morning awakening, or nonrestorative sleep
patients with mood disorders exhibit higher rates of sleep disturbance than the general population, and sleep disturbance can continue even during periods of remission
patients with insomnia are up to 10 times more [...]
Against Monopoly
The cool, hip techno-pundits are usually reliably Obama-liberal/libertarian-lite types. A bit California-smug, engineer-scientistic, anti-principle, anti-”extreme.” But okay overall. A soft, tolerant, whitebread bunch.
On the last This Week in Tech, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the always interesting Jason Calacanis voice support for nuclear power; and even more surprised to hear soft-liberal host Leo [...]
Against Monopoly
Excellent post by Kevin Carson, Gene Quinn: Patent Twit of the Week, criticizing patent attorney-shill Gene Quinn’s “arguments” for patents.
Go to Publisher to continue reading
Against Monopoly
The News Hour Monday had an interview with Ken Rogoff and Carmine Reinhart, authors of This Time Is Different and you can still see the video or download the transcript here. Its conclusions are sobering:
Our current crisis is like all the others studied over an 800 year span. They all result from ignorance [...]
Science Commons
Important (and exciting) news in the world of shared vocabularies at Science Commons, a key component of our technical work to make knowledge sharing more efficient.
As of last week, OWL 2 – a standard web ontology language – was formally recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of their Semantic Web [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
You may remember a post a few days ago in which Jeremy announced that Dr José F. M. Valls has won this year’s Meyer Medal. Well, José was briefly at SIRGEALC last week before going off to get his medal, and he gave a great talk on his life’s work on wild peanut [...]
Scienceroll
I launched PeRSSonalized Medicine to help patients and doctors keep themselves up-to-date more easily without any kind of IT knowledge. It is an easy-to-use, free aggregator of quality medical information that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles about a medical specialty or a medical condition in one personalized [...]
Dr Shock MD PhD
Aging is associated with well described changing in sleep patterns.
Total sleep time decreases, elderly sleep less
It takes longer before falling a sleep
Elderly go to bed earlier and they awake earlier
There sleep architecture has changed, the slow wave sleep on EEG is reduced, REM sleep is reduced
They’re easier aroused from sleep
They sleep fragmented [...]
Chris Pietschmann
I spent some time lately working on bringing some of the concepts of Web.Maps.VE to ASP.NET MVC. The concepts I’m referring to are Simplicity and Ease of Development in making the implementation of mapping within ASP.NET MVC applications as simple as possible along with the Flexibility and Customizability of the Base Mapping API itself. [...]