Biology consists of much detailed information regarding genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and a variety of other components.  This has provided a great deal of insight into how life functions, evolves, and reproduces.  However, there are other realms of biology that attempt to find order where perhaps none exists.  In discussions of topics like "selfish genes", or "kin selection", or Hamilton's rule, we are getting into areas where causation is being sought where none may specifically exist or at least, not of a general type.

Now we get to corn.  It seems that everything having to do with generating chemical energy, like methane and alcohol, making plastics is lumped under the moniker “biomass.” 

The fun with biomass is to follow the money.  Take biodiesel.  We just grow soybeans, rapeseed, sunflowers – whatever you want to make oil out of, press them and run diesel engines with it.

Cancer research took a fascinating step forward thanks to recent research by a collaborative group from Boston; a step that, if it pans out, could impact a wide swath of cancer drug development. The research is still in its early stages - mouse models - but the potential implications led to a great deal of media coverage. Just a few examples:

• "Scientists have found a way to disarm a protein thought to play a key role in leukaemia and other cancers," from NHS (UK)

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on Tinkering Makes a Comeback Amid Crisis. They are talking about what is referred to by varied terms such as Do-It-Yourself (DIY), the Make movement, and simply Crafting.  The concept is 'build cool stuff, like machines and lasers and robots."

ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta has swung by Earth for the third and final time, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.

Rosetta passed over the ocean just South of the Indonesian island of Java at exactly 08:45:40 CET with a speed of 13.34 km/s with respect to Earth and an altitude of 2481 km. 

The successful swingby was confirmed at 09:05 CET and spacecraft operators have confirmed that the swingby provided a boost of 3.6 km/s. 

Mice who had the PKCI/HINT1 gene removed had an anti-depressant-like and anxiolytic-like effect, say esearchers writing in BMC Neuroscience who applied a battery of behavioral tests to the PKCI/HINT1 knockout animals, concluding that the deleted gene may have an important role in mood regulation. Elisabeth Barbier and Jia Bei Wang, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland, USA, carried out the experiments to investigate the role of the gene in regulating mood function. Wang, the corresponding author of the paper, said, "The knockout mice displayed behaviors indicative of changes in mood function, such as increased perseverance and reduced anxiety in open spaces".

Many a parent has been driven to the point of madness by successive "why?" questions from preschoolers, but it's a good sign that they ask and they do better if they get a detailed explanation than if you just answer 'because.'

As a mouse vet, my job is to suggest refinements to make cancer studies as easy as possible on the mice. 

Today I got access to a collection of very cool pictures of the CMS detector, one of the two experiments designed and built to study proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Many of those pictures, which were taken by Michael Hoch (CERN/CMS) in the last couple of years, have circulated in the web for a long time, and individual ones have been used in several places. However, they are very nice to browse one after the other. And I think they are even more interesting to watch if one has not had the privilege of visiting the giant detector in its underground cavern, during its assembly last year. So I take the liberty of showing them to you here, in case you missed them - or just like to refresh your memory on this technological marvel.

PARCELATORIES OF SECOND ORDER

don't exist in fact. What exists are counting processes, a human ability that consist in to quantify, measure, compare and enumerate objects. Any object!

Because they exist only in our imagination, numbers are only abstract objects we use to calculate our usual counts.

As any abstract object, it was necessary to create symbolic properties to represent them. But substantially, they don't exist! They are therefore, fundamental cognitive concepts.

However the counting is a more fundamental concept yet! So fundamental that we don't perceive it.