Scientists have developed a way of converting one blood group into another. They can convert RH Positive blood from one blood group to another. This should fix the O-ve blood shortage problem. The absolutely amazing techniques uses micro-organisms to work on the blood cells and strip them of their “group”-iness. The paper describing the work was published in a Nature journal.
Oh, and by the way when some researcher says “potentially”, be wary:
The technique potentially enables blood from groups A, B and AB to be converted into group O negative, which can be safely transplanted into any patient.
What “potentially” really mean is - “we think it should work, and that it is a neato idea - but you are on your own for now, and can’t really seriously hold us to it.”
That’s enough chit-chat for now - have to get cracking on work now.
FKF Applied Research, with the help of UCLA’s Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, said that Coca-Cola’s “Video Game” ad–a 60-second animated spot that promotes random acts of kindness–scored this year because it elicited the most positive emotions in subjects’ brains.
Interesting research - they monitor brain activity to see which ads elicit the most “positive” response. They say some ads elicit a fear response and will be quickly forgotten - now we are in hot water. Why? Because people like my girl friend get enormously turned on by horror movies and the like. Going by the idea the FKF research folks put forward, the only movies that make a lasting, positive impression are the feel-good, empathy-generating ones, but we all know that Jaws, Omen etc have been huge hits and have been permanently etched into so many memories, world wide.
I think there is no way to tell which ads were more successful, but yes, you sure can find out which ones were terrible failures - those would be the ads that generated a minimal response from any part of the brain.
Now for your viewing pleasure, here is the best ad, according to the human brain:
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has been around for a long, long time and yet it stays handy to lookup that number sequence that shows up in your research data. Born from the AT&T research labs, back when they were still the best
In fact, it is handy to look up your phone number, or date of birth. In my case both yielded a list of papers that references the sequences!
Q: What is the purpose of the OEIS?
A: The main purpose is to allow mathematicians or other scientists to find out if some sequence that turns up in their research has ever been seen before.
If it has, they may find that the problem they’re working on has already been solved, or partially solved, by someone else.
Or they may find that the sequence showed up in some other situation,
which may show them an unexpected relationship between their problem and something else.
Another purpose is to have an easily accessible database of important, but difficult to compute, sequences.
For example, if you’re testing some conjecture about Mersenne primes, you can look up the ones that are known (see A000043),
rather than spending years recomputing them.
They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual…
Torfinn Ørmen, a zoologist who lectures on human evolutionary history at the University of Oslo, says that this is the biggest archaeological discovery in a long time.
“Sheila Coulson’s discovery is going to garner attention the world over. This is the oldest ritual site that we know of and it was in use before physically modern man left Africa”, Ørmen points out. He explains that the San, who are also referred to as Bushmen, belong to the most ancient race of humans. The San, together with the Khoi (or Khoikhoi), separated from the rest of the worlds people about 70,000 years ago. Today they are commonly refered to as the Khoi-San people. The Khoi and the San are quite similar and were displaced by both the Europeans and the Bantu before and during colonization.
“Some researchers believe that modern man descended from the San. What is certain is that the San are a very old people and that they have a very deep connection to this area of Botswana. The Tsodilo Hills are the San people’s most sacred place; they have had a connection to it for thousands and thousands of years”, says Torfinn Ørmen.
The world’s oldest ritual had to do with destruction - destructing spear heads in the name of “God” or nature. Man has come 70,000+ years, without learning much, I might add. The Africans revered a python, an elephant and a giraffe. We revere other stuff.
At Harvard’s business school, it’s forbidden to use Google to “solve” a case study by figuring out how the business actually turned out(Source: Peter Suber, Open Access News).
Now is it just me, or are these guys counter-intuitive? I guess the policy-makers at universities world wide need to grow younger and think lik students do, and I am not suggesting anything subversive, or radical or that they should start thinking like punks. The decision makers probably did not grow with the knowledge-awareness that the young have - where you have a better idea of what is possible, where to look for the solution (or data) and how to best get the information you need. The old have to learn, the young know, intuitively. Stopping the young from using the tools they know best will shackle their growth.
Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months
The new search tool makes a joke trivial - have you ever tried to check if your idea is original? Try it now, and be amazed at how many people out there get patents, and for what silly “inventions”.
I have often wondered what life would be like as a Synesthetic
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae) is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled
Wouldn’t it be fun if you could see different digits (numerals) in different colors, or if you could “see” sounds and “smell” colors. I guess I will never know what it feels like, but I really, truly wish I were synesthetic.
This article from seed, The most beautiful painting you’ve ever heard explores the world of synesthetics - a very interesting article. In it, there is a link to a youtube video of music composed by Ravel. The way it turned out, a synesthetic found out that the photos she was leafing through and the music that was playing (Ravel) were suggestive of one another:
“All of a sudden an adagio came on,” she recalled, “and the music looked exactly as the pictures sounded. I was having it in both directions at the same time. So I thought, I wonder if I could do this on purpose.”
The result is the video. Probably this is as close as I am ever gonna get to feeling what a synesthetic does. Enjoy!
I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I’m learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I start to learn Latex, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experiences plays to your advantage, since I hope I can let you into the sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning Latex.
The guide seems quite comprehensive, and should be useful for graduate students who use LaTeX a lot, or better still, want a better alternative to the braindead-ness of MS Word.
You are a PhD candidate and your thesis defense is already in sight. You have decided you would like to continue with a postdoctoral position rather than moving into industry as the next step in your career (that decision should be the subject of another “Ten Simple Rules”). Further, you already have ideas for the type of research you wish to pursue and perhaps some ideas for specific projects. Here are ten simple rules to help you make the best decisions on a research project and the laboratory in which to carry it out.
