Since the introduction of open lectures by progressive thinking educational institutions like M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, Yale, and others, many exceptional presentations have bubbled to the top and should be watched.
I listened to about a quarter of all the lectures from this course—most of which were over my head, but the first and second (mp3) classes are fascinating and make me wish I studied biology at school.
One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.
One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.
There’s been some exciting breakthroughs in the world of regenerative medicine. About three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.
His brother, Alan, a medical research specialist, sent him a special powder with instructions to sprinkle it on his wound. What happened next is truly a marvel of modern medicine: in only four weeks, his finger grew back.
Lee jokes that while he has a 69 year old body, the tip of his finger is only 2 and a half.
Wyatt Andrews of CBS news has the story:
This powder is a medical product called extracellular matrix. Made from pig bladders, it’s a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons. But it’s the matrix’s unusual power to regenerate tissue that’s help launch a new field called regenerative medicine.
I just finished reading the wonderful New Yorker article Darwin’s Surprise by Michael Specter. This is some of the most interesting reading around (at least in my opinion).
I should have been a biologist.
Nothing provides more convincing evidence for the “theory” of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.
And that trail appears to lead to the very roots of human existence and possibly to a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.
Check out their talk, Surrendipity: 2012 from the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
Richard Dawkins takes a stab at why we’re here, using science and reason to back up his answer. It’s an interesting and inspiring perspective on an old question.
When I was enrolled in University, one of the classes I wanted to take was Philosophy of Game Theory. Unfortunately, disillusioned by my lack of interest after taking the introductory class (a prerequisite) I decided that Philosophy wasn’t for me after all.
Game Theory (Wikipedia) however, is still a very fascinating topic. Couple that with an interest in biology, sociology, and economics and the short documentary, “Nice Guys Finish First“, by Richard Dawkins becomes a tremendously interesting look at how selfish and altruistic behavior can be the greatest benefit or harm to the individual—and consequently also to the group.
Here are several interesting animal “fights”. I’m not going to tell you ahead of time who is going to win, but be warned, it won’t always be what you might expect.
Within any collaborative effort, participants do their part giving so that there might be some kind of benefit reaped out of the collective work of the project. Derek Powazek proposes that perhaps the participants need not even be aware of their contributions in order for a system to form benefitting the perverbial greater good. Read about it in his post, Design for Selfishness.
As I read it, I started to think that as powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to pull the web into one easily accessible medium, a dissection at different levels of the internet can be very revealing. For example, on any given community driven web page the creator may have big plans for the users input of finely crafted content but may or may not be actually offering anything for it. As Powazek points out there has to be a reason for the user to contribute, “If you’re making a product that’s asking users to do something—anything—that is going to add value to your company, ask yourself why anyone would bother.” There are plenty of not so good reasons that get passed off all the time: “Because it’s cool!”, “Because they contribute to Wikipedia/Slashdot/Whatever, and we’re just like that!”, or “Because we enable them to use their voice.”
But he goes on to explain that there are some good answers too:
Because we solve a problem they have. Because we give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Because we enable a kind of communication that’s unlike anything else. Because we make their lives more convenient. Because we give them, or save them, money. Because we enable them to do more with less. Because they told us they wanted to.
The whole scenario reminds me of the concept presented in Richard Dawkins famous book, “The Selfish Gene”. The book’s thesis is that in any living creature the genes that get passed on are the ones whose mutations serve their own implicit interests, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level.
Let me use tagging photos as an example (I know this is the same one Powazek used, but it’s the best one). Within Flickr.com users have the ability to put tags on their photos. This helps them to find their own photos quickly and easily when they search by tag, but it also benefits the flickr community at large because they are able to search everyone’s photos by their tags.
The same is true within the context of the blogosphere as a whole. Here individuals write about specific topics and whatever their motivation the result is we are provided with a vast expanse of searchable content.
Thinking about all the posts and topics I’ve written about, I hope you, the good readers of this site, find something useful here.
Using supercomputers to respond to a potential American health emergency, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have developed a simulation model that makes stark predictions about the possible future course of an avian influenza pandemic.
Based on today’s environment of world-wide connectivity, beginning with 10 infected people arriving in Los Angelos, the simulation predicts that the pandemic will spread quickly throughout the continental United States, peaking about 90 days after the initial introduction.
The computer simulation models a synthetic population that matches U.S. census demographics and worker mobility data by randomly assigning the simulated individuals to households, workplaces, schools, and the like. Department of Transportation travel data is used to model long-distance trips during the course of the simulation, realistically capturing the spread of the pandemic virus by airplane and other passenger travel across the United States.
“In the highly mobile U.S. population, travel restrictions alone will not be enough to stop the spread; a mixture of many mitigation strategies is more likely to be effective than a few strictly enforced ones,” said Kadau, also of Los Alamos’ Theoretical Division.
The number of symptomatic cases at any point in time is shown on a logarithmic color scale, with 1 or fewer cases per 1000 in green, 50 per 1000 in yellow, and 100 or more per 1000 in red.
I’ve seen the “Female chromosome has X factor” article being linked to around the blogosphere in the last couple days so I thought I’d check it out. What I found was very interesting.
The discovery, by an international consortium of scientists, shows that females are far more variable than previously thought and, when it comes to genes, more complex than men.
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.