Talk to any molecular biologist, and you'll find that most of them feel that there is something that we're missing when we analyze complex biological systems. These systems are often too difficult to reason about verbally in any sort of detailed or rigorous way. So we build mathematical models, sometimes going to great effort to perform very precise measurements so that we can properly parameterize our models.
The Voynich Manuscript part 4 : Not So Mysterious ?The Voynich manuscript was written in an as yet unreadable script. It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it as a dealer in 1912 from the library of Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy. It is now in the care of Yale Library.
In my previous articles on Yale Library's Beinebecke MS 408 I focused on its background. I am now going to discuss some basic possibilities about its unusual script. I am still working on an attempt to transcribe the text into modern English. If I succeed, my readers here at
scientificblogging will be the first to know.
Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.
1. Drought is a serious problem in many parts of the world, going well beyond our California 'limit the days you water your lawn' irritation and well into 'We are going to die without rain' territory.
It's boom or bust in parts of India, where they actually look forward to monsoons - and sometimes they can't happen soon enough. But what if the water gods are fickle? Some crafty leaders in male-dominated Bihar think the solution is
to have young girls walk around naked.
GENEVA, Switzerland, July 23 -- Merck Serono, a division of Merck KGaA,
Darmstadt, Germany, announced today the submission of a marketing authorization
application (MAA) to the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) for Cladribine
Tablets, Merck Serono’s proprietary investigational oral formulation of
cladribine, as a therapy for patients with relapsing-remitting multiple
sclerosis (MS). Cladribine Tablets could become the first orally administered
disease-modifying therapy available for patients with MS, as all
disease-modifying therapies currently approved for the treatment of MS are
injectable.
In January this year, I finally found some like me out there! I was contacted. By a fellow space enthusiast. Throughout my childhood, I rarely met anyone who shared my curiosity for space and astronomy - and was agitated about it. Then, I finally found one. It was my classmates elder brother who had heard about my space related pursuits through grapevine. He ran his own space advocacy initiative and was looking forward to a consortium of space enthusiasts to observe the International Year of Astronomy.
DALLAS and BARCELONA, Spain, July 23 --
- Innovative web services technology NTRsupport Pro remote support offers IT a
significantly more profitable business model
Clusters, the largest structures in the Universe, are comprised of many galaxies, like the Milky Way. One mystery about clusters is why the gas in the centers of some are rapidly cooling and condensing but not forming into stars. Until recently, no model existed that successfully explained how this was possible.
A team of scientists say they have discovered a method for attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers end-run the current limits of Moore's Law in the quest to make microprocessors smaller and more powerful. Moore's Law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore who said in 1965 that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. But even Moore said the law cannot be sustained indefinitely. Or can it?
Some researchers, and certainly some new businesses, are counting on the fact that the brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can reveal thoughts and determine if someone is lying or telling the truth - and maybe even their hidden deep desires.
Is there something to it? It depends.
Neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University say they have evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to determine what a person is thinking but their research suggests that highly accurate "mind reading" using fMRI is still far from reality.
There's a coevolutionary struggle between a New Zealand snail and its worm parasite but it ends up being sexually advantageous for the snail, whose females favor asexual reproduction in the absence of parasites, according to scientists who say their report represents direct experimental evidence for the "Red Queen Hypothesis" of sex, suggesting sexual reproduction allows host species to avoid infection by their coevolving parasites by producing genetically variable offspring.
They say their Current Biology report also supports the "Geographic Mosaic Theory," meaning natural selection need not act uniformly on all members of a species, but can be intense in pockets of a population (hot spots) and absent elsewhere (cold spots).
