MachineMachine /stream - tagged with research

A world without mosquitoes

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:17:00 -0700

So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could…

"Lost" Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:56:00 -0700

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for…

The gut's 'friendly' viruses revealed

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:49:00 -0700

In the latest exploration into the universe of organisms inhabiting our bodies, microbiologists have discovered new viral genes in faeces. They find that the composition of virus populations inhabiting the tail ends of healthy intestines (as represented in our stools) is unique to each individual and stable over time. Even identical twins — who share many of the same intestinal bacteria — differed in their gut's viral make-up.

More than 80% of the viral genetic sequences found, which included sequences characteristic of both animal and bacterial viruses, have never been reported previously. "This is a largely unexplored…

Last Supper helpings have grown

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:46:00 -0700

An unusual study looks at the food portions in artistic depictions of the Last Supper throughout history. The apostles have eaten better and better over the years, scholars say.

The Christian faith holds several acts of "super-sizing" to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ -- a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American…

Science historian cracks the 'Plato code'

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:44:00 -0700

A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.

Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century…

Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:49:00 -0700

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity…

The Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text)

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:33:00 -0700

by John Cayley

Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has aged. It has acquired a history or at least some genuine engagement with the reality principle, now that the Net is accepted as a material and cultural given of the developed world, now that the dot.coms have crashed, now that unsolicited marketing email and commercialism dominates network traffic. Nonetheless, artistic practice in digital media is still often driven by youthful, escapist, utopian enthusiasms. Net Art as such…

As technology advances, deep reading suffers

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:55:00 -0700

Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read…

Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:50:00 -0700

The background to this research

Everybody loves giraffes, and god knows they've been covered on Tet Zoo enough times (see the links below). And something that's been mentioned many times is the alleged inability of giraffes to swim, or even to float. There are several specific comments on this in the literature (e.g., Shortridge 1934, Goodwin 1954, MacClintock 1973, Wood 1982); Crandall (1964) mentioned a case where a captive giraffe escaped from a carrying crate, fell off the end of a jetty, and immediately sank in the Hudson River (incidentally, dead giraffes have…

Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:08:00 -0700

One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics, others obscure anarchic tomes and legal texts – presented in a simple, sleek alphabetized index of .pdfs.

The idea from the beginning was that AAAARG’s collection would grow organically, since anyone can upload a text to the site. But what takes this beyond basic p2p sharing is the way the index relates to the site’s other peer features:…

Neutrinos are some of the most abundant yet mysterious particles in our unive...

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:56:00 -0700

Neutrinos are some of the most abundant yet mysterious particles in our universe. Every second 50 trillion of them fly through our bodies without so much as a trace. Their neutral electric charge and miniscule mass allow neutrinos to pass through ordinary matter practically undisturbed.

This characteristic of neutrinos also makes the tiny particles frustratingly difficult to detect. It is no surprise, then, that scientists must go to great extremes to build a functional neutrino detector. Often the equipment must be buried beneath a mountain or submerged in an ultra-deep lake to isolate the…

Writing off the UK's last palaeographer

Sat, 29 May 2010 10:04:00 -0700

Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by surprise. "It…

Techno-Archaeology Rescues Climate Data from Early Satellites

Sat, 29 May 2010 09:51:00 -0700

Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or more. Researchers at NSIDC and NASA have shown that the oldest Earth observing satellite data can be made to yield new information, adding significantly to the view of Earth's climate history.

When NASA launched the first Nimbus satellite in the 1960s, they also launched an era of Earth observations from space. While the early Nimbus satellites provided meteorological and other observations, methods did not yet exist to…

Gottschall's Problem

Sun, 16 May 2010 16:21:00 -0700

These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion, an attempt to explain the magic of human achievement with the most indelicate tools. Gottschall is calling for a science of the humanities—notscience in the humanities (as in Darwinian literary theory), but science of. The distinction is important. To critics, a science of the humanities is simply unfathomable, a contradiction in terms. It weaponizes Darwinian theory, co-opts the most painstaking literary work, and bashes away close reading with a club.…

Spiders Devour Ants Front-End First

Fri, 14 May 2010 03:35:00 -0700

A spider that only eats ants is choosy about which body parts of its prey it devours based on their nutritional value.

These new findings are the first to demonstrate that "specialist" predators relying on a single food source might have evolved feeding behaviors to maximize what they get out of meal time, the researchers say.

"We found that these spiders do have to balance their nutrient intake by choosing different body parts of their exclusive ant prey," said Stano Pekár, an assistant professor of ecology and zoology at Masaryk University in the Czech…

Eureka! Neural evidence for sudden insight

Fri, 14 May 2010 02:28:00 -0700

A recent study provides intriguing information about the neural dynamics underlying behavioral changes associated with the development of new problem solving strategies. The research... supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in the brain that are associated with sudden insight.

Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies that are no longer advantageous and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through trial-and-error learning, the neural dynamics that underlie the change from a familiar to a novel rule are not well understood.
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The Ship Argo

Sun, 09 May 2010 12:37:00 -0700

Mr. Daniel posted a photo:

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

European and Asian genomes have traces of Neanderthal

Sun, 09 May 2010 06:53:00 -0700

The genomes of most modern humans are 1–4% Neanderthal — a result of interbreeding with the close relatives that went extinct 30,000 years ago, according to work by an international group of researchers.

The team, led by Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is reporting only 60% of the Neanderthal genome. But sequencing even this much of the genome was thought to be impossible just a decade ago.

"This will change our view of humanity," says John Hardy, a neuroscientist at University College London who was…

The code within the code

Fri, 07 May 2010 02:12:00 -0700

One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy table, to encode the 20 standard amino acids that combine to form a protein.

But between DNA and proteins comes RNA, and an expanding realm of complexity. RNA is a shape-shifter, sometimes carrying genetic messages and sometimes regulating them, adopting a multitude of structures that can affect its function. In a paper published in this issue (see page 53), a team of researchers led by Benjamin Blencowe and Brendan…

Giorgio Agamben - What is a Paradigm - Lecture, 2002

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:39:00 -0700

...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in the human sciences, or even in art? These are the questions I will try to answer today. Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands…