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Sweet
links for 2010-09-30
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"Like an engineer accounting for a skyscraper swaying in the wind, Madagascar's Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) spins enormous, river-spanning webs that stretch and contract as the trees to which they're anchored bend this way and that. A new study finds that this spider's silk is the toughest biomaterial yet discovered."
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"Now, scientists in the United States have devised a computer model for identifying a protein that could serve as a type of scaffold, locking an epitope into the structure to which a neutralizing antibody can bind." Yay, for protein design!
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"As Einstein predicted, a slow drive or a step up a ladder is enough to warp time."
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Want.
The Short Lifespan of a Tweet: Retweets Only Happen Within the First Hour
For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos, for the majority of users, Twitter is indeed mostly a broadcast medium. After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction – that is, a reply or a retweet. According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet.
via @alexdc via www.readwriteweb.com
Hm, Tweet lifetime of attention around an hour.
Methinks it's due to the way people follow. For example, we've noticed that Facebook posts peter out after about two days. But I bet the power curve is more like 24 hours.
And knowing the Facebook pattern, I never thought of what the pattern would be in other channels. With this new piece of data, it clear (d'oh, and so obvious) that the way once follows a stream affects the lifetime of a "quanta" withing a stream.
Thinking of YouTube, you have a high degree of promotion of videos and also folks searching for videos, which might explain why a video I made two years ago is still gaining tens of thousands of views a month – it feeds itself and grows.
Now I'll be looking at stream design in a new light.
Complexification: Complexity not so costly after all
Further, the analysis showed that the ability of organisms to adapt is highest at intermediate levels of complexity. "This means a simple organism is not best, and a very complex organism is not best; some intermediate level of complexity is best in terms of the adaptation rate," Zhang said.
The new findings help buffer evolutionary biology against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents, Zhang said. "The evolution of complexity is one thing that they often target. Admittedly, there were some theoretical difficulties in explaining the evolution of complexity because of the notion of the cost of complexity, but with our findings these difficulties are now removed."
I've been mulling over complexity for decades. If everything tends to entropy (as I've been taught), then why do we have anything atoms, molecules, organisms, societies? In my view, everything tends towards complexity (I call it "complexification").
This study is reported to show that if you're too simple or too complex you're not going to adapt. Makes sense – you need to be flexible to find that sweet spot of survival and propagation, be too rigid or too loose and you lose.
links for 2010-09-27
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Something I wrote back in 2008: Biology is messy
Some folks think biology behaves properly and regularly like electronics (which we all know is a passing fad). Go into any laboratory and you will see the modern-day alchemist repeating experiments that work one day and not the other, joking about the phases of the moon or position of the chairs.
Do I feel this way because it is so early in the neo-biology game? Am I just an old fuddy-duddy who learned biology in the previous century?
I think that's irrelevant. Digital electronics have distracted us from the analogue world, such that when we turn our attentions to biology, we've forgotten how to think in gradients, thresholds, probability, or chaotic flows in regulatory networks. Indeed, the biochemistry I learned and did was all about this and it's a thrilling way of doing things. I think those with strong digital sensibilities will have a hard time embracing the uncertainty and variability so common in biological systems.
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"Noise, far from just a nuisance, has begun to be appreciated for its essential role in key cellular activities. Noise functions in both microbial and eukaryotic cells, in multicellular development, and in evolution." (reg required)
Great review.
links for 2010-09-23
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""I started doing it because nobody believed me," says Tom Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who works with Fordyce. He got the idea to sequence ancient RNA after seeing a paper that described the germination of a 2,000-year-old date seed — a process that requires intact RNA1."
Hm. Plants are doing something interesting to preserve their RNA so well.
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"Researchers report in this week's issue of Nature that Thermococcus onnurineus, a single-celled organism known as an archaeon living in deep-sea vents, has another enviable ability. It is the first microbe found to survive on the meagre energy provided by a very simple respiratory pathway: the conversion of formate (HCOO−) and water into hydrogen and bicarbonate1."
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"And by looking at signals from GPS satellites in different locations, they were able to map the progress of the ionospheric electron 'wave' as it raced across the sky, about 10 minutes behind the tsunami."
Freaky.
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"It may be small-scale and without fanfare, but genomic medicine has clearly arrived in the United States. A handful of physicians have quietly begun using whole-genome sequencing in attempts to diagnose patients whose conditions defy other available tools."
DNA info to personalize treatment is no longer in the future. It's here and doing well.
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"Some of the best bits about working at BERG are how everyone, despite having particular specialist skills, gleefully ignores boundaries, disciplines, labels and predefined processes, and allows themselves space to just run with things when they get excited. Deciding to do the music for the first Making Future Magic film ourselves was one of those moments."
links for 2010-09-19
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"For more than four years, Hellyar, supply chain manager for Dunkin’ Donuts, has hunted for an alternative to the much maligned Styrofoam cup — long enough to earn him the nickname “Joey Cups.’’ The ideal container would have to be recyclable or compostable, keep coffee hot, and not cost franchisees too much."