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ananyob's comments

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Crick's DNA Nobel medal gets $2 million at auction

>>>The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell [walnut-sized, flying saucer-shaped] electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers."<<<< None of the claims are proven yet of-course...

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Researcher's trick transforms conservatives into liberals ahead of election

Yeah - the trick worked both ways>> "on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time."

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Brain scans predict which criminals are more likely to reoffend

"In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner."

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Most popular human cell in science (HeLa) gets sequenced

From the article -"The research world’s most famous human cell has had its genome decoded, and it’s a mess. German researchers this week report the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which originates from a deadly cervical tumour taken from a patient named Henrietta Lacks.

Established after Lacks died in 1951, HeLa cells were the first human cells to grow well in the laboratory. The cells have contributed to more than 60,000 research papers, the development of a polio vaccine in the 1950s and, most recently, an international effort to characterize the genome, known as ENCODE."

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Russian meteor largest in a century

NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed. >>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: When Google got flu wrong

Bit unfair. The article repeatedly says there are promising techniques for crowd-sourcing etc and that Google Flu Trends has been quite accurate in the past. Also says that a few methods have entered the mainstream. It's a rather good overview of the efforts for tracking flu IMHO.

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain

He doesn't say nothing was really proven - he just says that they didn't establish whether this dislike of dissonance was innate or not. That wasn't what the experiment was about. It was to find what caused the dislike - and they ruled out 'beating' and propose it's harmonicity. It's also not beating per se which people find unpleasant but rapid beating -roughness. Does Gamelan try to produce 'roughness'-ie rapid beating - or just beating - which I could imagine would be quite cool.

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain

That's underselling it a bit, I think? They've ruled out the dominant hypothesis with their experiment (beating/roughness) and propose another - harmony of overtones. Quite clever to do the experiment with people with amusia. Wonder if this has anything to say about the old CD versus vinyl debate? Or was that nonsense anyway?

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Italian court finds seismologists guilty of manslaughter

Some news sources have consistently misreported this as saying that they were being tried for "failing to predict the earthquake". That would, of-course, be nonsense as no-one can predict when an earthquake might strike. However, that is not what the prosecution said - their case was based on the scientists failing to communicate risk properly. Quoting the source: "The verdict was based on how they assessed and communicated risk before the earthquake that hit the city of L'Aquila on 6 April 2009, killing 309 people" That was the real reason.

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: First mammal observed to be regenerating lost tissue

From the source: Jeremy Brockes, who studies limb regeneration in newts at University College London, agrees that it should be possible to use this work to improve wound healing in people. “The genomic resources are so powerful now that one could easily identify some aspect of regeneration in mice that could be helpful for human health,” he says.

ananyob | 13 years ago | on: Most stars are actually born as two seperate suns

Link text should have said 'Many' stars are born as two separate stars. That is consistent - it's not clear to me what proportion of single stars started off as binaries - probably not 'most', I admit. The implication of the paper, though, is that many stars around now that we think of as 'single stars' started life as binaries.
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