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I’ve read all of Dan Brown’s books, and consider this to be his best yet. It’s the fourth book to feature Robert Langdon, distinguished US academic and expert in symbology. This time most of the action in the first part of the book takes place in Florence, one of my favourite cities, so that’s a […]
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For the past few weeks I’ve been traveling the globe at back-to-back conferences – hence the silence here. The conference universe has its own natural laws, and time flows differently as its strict routines overwrite all of your own normal … Continue reading →
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Researchers and Community advocates take on breast cancer together
“Nail salon workers routinely handle products containing many potentially harmful compounds, some of which are carcinogens or have endocrine disrupting effects, yet are virtually unregulated,” said Thu Quach, a research scientist at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California in Fremont. “Many of these women work in small shops with poor ventilation for up to 12 hours a day.”
Quach heads an ongoing study, funded by the
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This morning President Obama, in the administration’s annual performance of don’t-change-the-interest-rate-on-student-loans, urged college students to call their Congressional representatives and urge them to keep the interest rate on federally-backed education loans at 3.4 percent.
According to a Huffington Post piece:
President Barack Obama on Friday stepped into the hyper-partisan fight over student debt, warning about the economic dangers posed by rising debt burdens and
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Profiles in Research: Gabriel Rodriguez
Grad student Gabriel Rodriguez is engineering E. coli to produce a precursor to rubber (using genes from soil and cheese). The production of chemicals from microorganisms can solve some significant challenges:
“The idea is to take a non-naturally occurring product and enable it to be renewably produced. If you can do this in a way that’s cost effective, you could have something that is made from biological material rather than fossil fuels. If you
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We’ve all been hearing about parallel computing, and now it has turned up in a coin-weighing puzzle invented by Konstantin Knop.
“We have N indistinguishable coins. One of them is fake and it is not known whether it is heavier or lighter, but all genuine coins weigh the same. There are two [...]
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Once when I was working at Telcordia, I received a phone call from my doctor’s office. Here is how it went:
— Are you Tanya Khovanova?
— Yes.
— You should come here immediately and redo your blood test ASAP.
— What’s going on?
— Your blood count shows that you are dead.
— If I’m dead, then what’s the [...]
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COPD and the brain 142- Decreased cerebrovascular response to CO2 in post-menopausal females with COPD: role of oxidative stress – Hartmann et al. Stroke and the brain 143- The relationship of flow velocities to vessel diameters differs between extracranial carotid and vertebral arteries of stroke patients – Owolabi et al. Positioning and the brain 144- […]
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Todays post is inspired by members of my lab . We were recently involved in put...
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Both, Matthis and Rodolphe, the two French volunteers who just arrived at the Bonobo field station, have experience with fieldwork in Africa. But cuddling little apes is the rare exception in their line of work. Most fieldwork is a lot less romantic. The rainforest is, of course, a fascinating and exciting place, but instead of wandering and admiring, they will be working on a pretty tight schedule. In order to get somewhat reliable information about the species and habitats in... Read more
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Not so long ago I stumbled across a very enthusiastic review of a new book by the renowned entomologist EO Wilson. The book was not about ants as such, his speciality, but its content can be deduced from the title: … Continue reading →
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Day 1We finally made it out of Port Elizabeth on the evening of the 29th May following delays of all sorts. We are now well underway on our route to Mauritius. We will start taking water samples when we are out of the 200 nautical miles range. On our first day the weather was gorgeous, 15 kts of wind and we caught our first yellowfin tuna (5 kg) on the line that we trawl ‘just in case’. The tuna then magically transformed into sushi that we all very much enjoyed. You can't get any
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