Open Knowledge, cyber-activism and social uses of technologies are some of the topics that Dutch Media theorist and activist Geert Lovink likes to tackle. He is Associate Professor in the Media & Culture department at the University of Amsterdam and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures and co-founder of Internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. Lovink is also the author of "Dark Fiber", which has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Romanian, German and Japanese.

Lovink visited Spain this week to talk about ‘The politics of open knowledge production’ at El Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and ‘About critic culture in the Internet’ in Seville at Zemos98 Festival and Enrique Sacristan from Servicio de Informacion y Noticias Cientificas(SINC) conducted this interview:

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a strain of mice that exhibit unusually high rates of maternal neglect, with approximately one out of every five females failing to care for her offspring. By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine.

As a possible model for human child neglect, these mice offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of naturally occurring maternal neglect, say UW-Madison zoology professor Stephen Gammie, who led the study, and co-author psychology professor Anthony Auger.

Everyone has heard of superconductors but a superinsulator is a newly-discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions that opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics and breaks ground for a new generation of microelectronics.

Led by Argonne senior scientist Valerii Vinokur and Russian scientist Tatyana Baturina, the international team fashioned a thin film of titanium nitride with they then chilled to near absolute zero.

When they tried to pass a current through the material, the researchers noticed that its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100,000 once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. The same sudden change also occurred when the researchers decreased the external magnetic field.

Ethanol is not great. Even Al Gore had to eventually concede he had made a mistake in promoting it for almost two decades once it became common knowledge that driving food prices up for a costly, energy-negative alternative to gasoline that didn't improve the environment was a bad idea.

But what if it weren't energy negative or costly and used a lot less corn?

Cows, with help from bacteria, convert plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, but this is a big, expensive step for biofuel production. In the commercial biofuel industry, only the kernels of corn plants can be used to make ethanol, but this new discovery would allow the entire corn plant to be used – so more fuel can be produced with less cost.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa have developed a technique called expected mutual information (EMI)to detect the ancestry of disease genes in hybrid, or mixed, human populations.

EMI determines how a set of DNA markers is likely to show the ancestral origin of locations on each chromosome. The team constructed an algorithm for the technique that selects panels of DNA markers that render the best picture of ancestral origin of disease genes. They then tested the algorithm to show that it is more powerful and accurate than standard algorithms that currently select for markers.

A research team from the Leioa campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and led by Ms Concepción de la Rúa, has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains.

Knowing the history of past populations and answering unresolved questions about them is highly interesting, more so when the information is obtained from the extraction of genetic material from historical remains. An example is the necropolis at Aldaieta (Araba) where some of these mysteries about these peoples have been answered – thanks to the study of their DNA.

Israelis and Palestinians may not be able to agree right now on their present or future, but, if a pair of Los Angeles archaeologists have their way, they soon will see eye to eye on their past.

Working tirelessly for the past five years, Ran Boytner, a University of California, Los Angeles archaeologist and Lynn Swartz Dodd, an archaeologist at the University of Southern California, have guided a team of prominent Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists to arrive at the first-ever agreement on the disposition of the region's archaeological treasures following the establishment of a future Palestinian state.

Patient safety incidents cost the federal Medicare program $8.8 billion and resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths during 2004 through 2006, according to HealthGrades' fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.

HealthGrades' analysis of 41 million Medicare patient records found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals had, on average, a 43 percent lower chance of experiencing one or more medical errors compared to the poorest-performing hospitals.

The overall incident rate was approximately three percent of all Medicare admissions evaluated, accounting for 1.1 million patient safety incidents during the three years studied. With the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scheduled to stop reimbursing hospitals for the treatment of eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain post-surgical infections, starting October 1, the financial implications for hospitals are substantial.