Nils Reinton › Likes

You can see all of your email settings at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor

I get these every day. - CW✔

"Because of its enticing properties, spider silk has enormous potential. It could be put to all sorts of uses, from strong sutures to artificial ligaments to body armour. That is, if only we could make enough of the stuff. Farming spiders is out of the question. They are territorial animals with a penchant for eating each other. It took 82 people, 4 years and 1 million large spiders to make a piece of cloth just 11 feet by 4 feet. The alternative is to synthesise spider silk artificially. That hasn’t been easy. Scientists have long since managed to reconstruct the proteins in the silk, using everything from bacteria to potatoes to goats. But these systems only provided small amounts of silk proteins, and would be expensive to scale up. Making silk proteins is just part of the far harder challenge of turning proteins into silk fibres, with their complex microscopic structures. To get around these problems, Donald Jarvis, Malcolm Fraser and Randolph Lewis had a simple idea: why not use... more... - John (bird whisperer) from Bookmarklet

"Edvard Munch is best known for The Scream, 1893, an image endlessly reproduced in the media to depict mental anguish. Explanations of the meaning behind the image abound, mainly focusing on an outpouring of emotion in response to suffering. Munch’s own explanation is revealed in his diaries, which recall the melancholy of a walk along a bridge with friends. Trembling in fear at the fiery sunset, he sensed ‘how an infinite scream was going through the whole of nature’. This dehumanised figure, into which viewers project their own neuroses, is not screaming but blocking out the scream of its existence." - Todd Hoff

Another interesting interpretation is around infantilism. Infant means without speech. As babies we can't speak so we cry and scream until we get we want. Dirty dipers we scream and someone takes care of it. If that wasn't what we wanted we scream again until we get what we want and they we are quiet. As babies we learn someone will be there to make it all OK. As adults we learn nobody... more... - Todd Hoff

Todd Rider, an MIT research scientist, is developing an antiviral drug called Draco that has proven successful in lab trials with human tissue and mice against all 15 viruses it has used for. . These include the common cold, H1N1 or swine flu, a polio virus, dengue fever and the notorious and fatal Ebola virus. [...]

"She has described measles (the disease which has killed more children than any other in the history of the world) as "benign;" she suggested the slogan "Shaken Maybe Syndrome" as a way of implying that Shaken Baby Syndrome does not exist but is always damage caused by vaccines; she provided strong support to a man imprisoned in the US for the murder of a ten-week-old boy, her support being based on the idea that the dreadful injuries to the child had to be the effects of a vaccine, not the actions of a violent man; she is on record as an AIDS denier; she said on television that "whooping cough didn't kill us thirty years ago and it's not kill anybody today"" - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"heal if they get a disease" isn't that a hypocritical statement not to mention extremely self-righteous, do you honestly believe that if their kids fell ill and were unable to heal, they'd of written such irresponsible rubbish? I don't mean to sound nasty, but this is totally irresponsible and will they take responsibility for all the children's deaths that could/may result from their... more... - Halil

"Not all brain regions are created equal – instead, a "rich club" of 12 well-connected hubs orchestrates everything that goes on between your ears. This elite cabal could be what gives us consciousness. (...) As part of an ongoing effort to map the human "connectome" – the full network of connections in the brain (...) The researchers (....) found 12 areas of the brain had significantly more connections than all the others, both to other regions and among themselves."These 12 regions have twice the connections of other brain regions, and they're more strongly connected to each other than to other regions," (...) "If we wanted to look for consciousness in the brain, I would bet on it turning out to be this rich club," (...) The elite group consists of six pairs of identical regions, with one of each pair in each hemisphere of the brain. Each member is known to accept only preprocessed, high-order information, rather than raw incoming sensory data. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"This network makes the way the brain functions more robust overall, but it could also leave the entire system vulnerable to breakdown if key hubs are damaged or disabled, says Van den Heuvel. (...) After mapping the connections, Van den Heuvel's team manipulated the data to see what might happen if parts of the rich club were damaged. The simulated brain lost three times as much... more... - Amira

Central thesis: "open access means that there will be more potentially harmful papers available to general public". We should get rid of the internet too, perhaps? - Noel O'Boyle

And finally, the biggest win of OA will be when the general public actually cares about open access to knowledge, not when scholarly communication will be open and still nobody cares. That will translate to _rational_ public discourse, because fact checking and hypothesis testing will be a normal mode of coming to conclusions on public issues. Indeed, there's a place for anecdotal evidence, but they serve as a starting points of coming to conclusions, not end points. - Pawel Szczesny

Have an idea for immediate reuse, but couldn't find the page where you state the licensing terms. - Daniel Mietchen

Can you make the background image available? Would like to reuse it in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... . - Daniel Mietchen

Academic publishers' fall from disgrace will be soon and precipitous. The "rock star" authors will switch to open access (such as PLoS) and the rest well follow in an exponentially increasing rate for the next 1-2 years. The inflection point will be in 2-3 years, and 5 years from now, only a few unfortunate bitter scientific fields will be stuck publishing in closed-access... more... - Steve Koch

BTW: I made a foolish bet many months ago on @Peter Binfield's post about when OA will take over on Pub Med. I wonder how badly I'm losing that now? Anyone remember the thread? - Steve Koch

Heh. I haven't read very much sci-fi (at least not in a long time), but I have read and liked 6 of the top 11. Maybe I should try some again soon :) - Eivind

Anika: Funny, that was my first thought too. Why is Ender's game so much higher than the Foundation series? :) - Ken Morley

Not just them - Deepak Singh

“Tomorrow we will show the world that Norway’s democracy grows stronger when it is challenged. (…) We must never cease to stand up for our values. We have to show that our open society can pass this test, too, and that the answer to violence is even more democracy, even more humanity, but never naïveté.” — Speech by Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in Oslo Cathedral - Amira from Bookmarklet

I really like those statements. - Eivind

“Norway’s Prime Minister is a liberal atheist, they have one of the best economies in the world, they have universal health care, and subsidized education, it has had the highest Human Development Index 7 years in a row, and it’s never started a pointless war, given tax breaks to the richest, and created Jersey Shore — yet it’s America that knows best.” — Matthew Trevithick, responding to this story: “Former Bush Official Places Blame For Oslo Attack On Norwegians For Not Being ‘Serious’ About Terrorism - Amira

It was one of those TED talks that the audience is sure to remember – except, it’s not the talk [...]

"Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam." - Sean McBride from Bookmarklet

I wonder how that ass ferret scott biddulph feels, since he is peddling the same kind of bigotry and hate. I hope he sleeps well at night. - Rene, Pro Button Pusher

Today I am Muslim. - Eivind

Maybe that was the shooter's whole intent. - Ruchira S. Datta

From article: "The problem isn't with any of this budding science. It's with marketing claims that exaggerate or are too vague to offer real guidance." - Cesar Sanchez from Bookmarklet

"When consumers taste a chocolate bar they think is made in Switzerland, they'll prefer it over one supposedly made in China, according to new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But if you tell them where it's from after they taste the candy, they'll prefer the Chinese chocolate. "Imagine being at a wine tasting and finding out that a wine is expensive after tasting it," write authors Keith Wilcox, Anne L. Roggeveen, and Dhruv Grewal (all Babson College). "Will learning the price afterwards affect your evaluation differently compared to if you had learned the price beforehand?" The authors found that the answer seems to depend on whether the information is favorable or not. In the chocolate study, undergraduates were given unbranded squares of Trader Joe's chocolates to taste. Half of the participants were told the chocolate was made in Switzerland; the remaining students were told the chocolate was made in China. But some were told this information before eating the chocolate... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Looking forward to it! :) - Berci Mesko, MD

Where did you submit it? - Björn Brembs

Who is this "Neil" character? - Bill Hooker

“I wouldn’t waste my time because I don’t believe it” - this is what science has always been. Scientists have more inertia than a galaxy. - Todd Hoff

@David_Dobbs @keithkloor how does this fit with http://twitter.com/David_D... ? - Daniel Mietchen

Tomorrow is a national holiday. For the first time this year it will be so warm that partly cloudy is a good thing :) - Eivind

LOL. Yup. Saturday looks like today, only a degree or two warmer :) - Eivind

Quote: ""They only take genetic factors into account when predicting risks for consumers, whereas in most multi-factorial diseases other modifiable risk factors, such as diet, environment, exercise and smoking have a much stronger impact on disease risk", said Professor Janssens. "We are all aware of the ethical problems surrounding DTC genetic testing, but this study also confirms that... more... - Nils Reinton

Quote II: ""Genome-wide scans by companies are totally unacceptable, as they can derive sensitive information about medically relevant conditions and will also provide lots of information which is difficult to interpret, even for medical professionals", said another respondent. Presenting the results of such tests directly to individuals is unacceptable, the majority of those surveyed said. " - Nils Reinton