MachineMachine / stream

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Let's make one thing clear: Jim Collins won't grow you a house any time soon. More than a decade ago, Collins, a decorated scientist at Boston University, helped give birth…

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The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of…

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Editor's note: Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and the 2006 laureate of the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences awarded…

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team of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleoartists has created a more accurate Neanderthal reconstruction, based on a nearly complete skeleton discovered in France more than 100 years ago. The La Ferrassie…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of…

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In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world.…

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For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield…

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Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised…

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Dyson refutes the idea that scientific revolutions are concept-driven, a stance pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later endorsed by other…

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Viruses are constantly swarming into our bodies. Sometimes they make us sick; sometimes our immune systems vanquish them; and sometimes they become a part of ourselves. A type of virus…

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It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to…

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There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative…

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Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient. Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that…

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As pressure on resources increases, pollution accumulates and humanity's impact on Earth escalates, global-scale governance of the environment is increasingly necessary. In June, the United Nations' Rio+20 Earth Summit in…

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A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a…

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"Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine…

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We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human…

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The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this,…

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Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get…

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Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his…

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Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

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"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…

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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…