Category: Slimey stuff
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Danger Theory and artificial immune systems
In recent years, various researchers have attempted to build computer security systems modelled on the human immune system. The idea is that if the system detects an invader, this triggers an immune response that kills the foreigner. These systems don’t work terribly well, perhaps because the human immune system doesn’t work like that either. In…
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Australians make interstellar hologram
Measure the beam from a pulsar for an hour or so and you’ll see all kinds of interference fringes in amongst the noise. This intereference is caused by light scattered from the interstellar medium, probably in the form of whisps of gas and dust although nobody knows for sure. There’s all kinds of infromation locked…
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Worm tracking: never lose another nematode
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a much loved workhorse in many biology labs. This worm may only be 1mm long and move at snails pace but it is one of the most heavily studied organisms on the planet. C. elegans was the first metazoan to have its genome sequenced. We know that a fully grown…
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Information and evolution
Living things need to know what conditions are like in the outside world so they can adapt to their environment. Is there food, light, heat out there and if so, where. So a certain amount of information must flow into the organism. This information flow is crucial–without it life could not exist so it’s reasonable…
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How to predict a brainquake
Welcome back. Hope ya’ll had a good holiday and that 2008 brings your hearts’ desires. First up this year, a cracker of a paper showing how epileptic fits might be predicted following the discovery of a profound statistical analogy between earthquakes and “brainquakes”. Ivan Osirio at the University of Kansas Medical Centre and a…
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Does surgery cause cancer to metastasize?
Medicos are increasingly turning to mathematical and computer models of disease to better understand how it works. But these models ain’t easy to build: the human body has many nonlinear properties that are hard to measure let alone model. But mathematicians have a tool called superstatistics for dealing with nonlinear phenomena. It’s essentially the superposition…
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The encouraging habitability of exoplanets
Not alotta of planets around other stars could support life judging by the criteria we look for now: the possible presence of liquid water. In fact none of ’em could (with the possible exception of one). But our method for determining whether liquid water could be present is crude to say the least. It’s based…
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The viscoelastic flytrap
Nepenthes are cruel carnivorous plants from the Asian tropics that eat any crittur unlucky enough to fall into the digestive juices they secret inside their bowl-shaped petals. It’s a slow sticky death in which the insect slowly dissolves while a-strugglin’ and a-scramblin’ to get out. But exactly how the plants trap their prey has puzzled…
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The frightening prospect of flu
Bird flu may get all the headlines but the number of deaths it causes each year is currently measured in hundreds. The real killer, the one that should set yer spine a-shiver, is ordinary fly which kills hundreds of thousands each year. With winter nearly upon us up here in the northern hemisphere, the spectre…
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A habitable planet in Libra?
Where are all them habitable planets that we gonna move to when Earth becomes too hot ‘n’ nasty for us? (By “habitable”, astrobiobods mean host to liquid water.) Turns out that a coupla good candidates are orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light years from here in the constellation of Libra (Gliese…