Technology

One of the original four pillars of the original Science 2.0 concept was modernizing publication of research. Open access, I have always said, is an important first step. First step? Isn't the problem settled by open access, by taking down the subscription firewall? No, taxpayers still pay for that, open access is just making a new kind of publisher wealthy using government money. Science 2.0 has instead advocated open publication, where no one has to pay to publish or to read. Obviously open access publishers say that is untenable - the exact argument they use against subscription publishers…

Imagine getting this text message when you are at the pub tonight: "Looking forward to seeing you at 2 AM - General Hospital". Creepy, but it may work.  Young adults who screened positive for a history of hazardous or binge drinking reduced their binge drinking by more than 50 percent after receiving mobile phone text messages following a visit to the emergency department, according to a new paper.  Researchers enrolled 765 young adult emergency patients with a history of hazardous drinking in the study. For 12 weeks, one-third received text messages prompting them to respond to…

One possible future in the therapy of children with cognitive and motor-skill disabilities could involve the popular Finnish game "Angry Birds" - and a robot. Georgia Institute of Technology recently paired a small humanoid robot with an Android tablet and then asked kids to teach the robot how to play the game, dragging their finger on the tablet to whiz the bird across the screen. The robot watches what happens and records "snapshots" in its memory. It notices where fingers start and stop, and how the objects on the screen move according to each other, while constantly keeping an eye on…

For good or bad, the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare - is making electronic health records ubiquitous.That means the sheer quantity of clinical data that will become available for research and analytic purposes will skyrocket. The possibility for clinical analytics to analyze large quantities of data for the purpose of gleaning insights has the potential to improve the value of patient care. Science knows all about such big data. It will be good to see if new approaches for health care can benefit research also.   A paper in Health Affairs highlights 6 of the clearest opportunities where…

There are 10 proteins in the blood which can predict the onset of Alzheimer's and that means there may be a blood test for the disease on the horizon. Proteomics company Proteome Sciences plc and King's College London examined over individuals from three international studies. Blood samples from a total of 1,148 individuals (476 with Alzheimer's disease; 220 with 'Mild Cognitive Impairment' (MCI) and 452 elderly controls without dementia) were analyzed for 26 proteins previously shown to be associated with Alzheimer's disease. A sub-group of 476 individuals across all three groups…

The PandaX experiment of China is located in a deep underground laboratory, shielded by 2,400 meters of low radioactive rocks to provide protection for PandaX against cosmic muons. It began operation in March but has no results yet, so they published a technical design report to show the Chinese government they are doing something. Established in 2009, the Particle and Astrophysical Xenon (PandaX) collaboration was established in 2009 and is geared toward both direct dark matter detection and Xe-136 neutrinoless double beta decay search. The experiment employs Xenon dual-phase technology to…

Medicine is advancing rapidly and it always has risks, but in early going the risks are going to be greater. A paper found that the risk of patient harm increased two-fold in 2006, the year when teaching hospitals nationwide embraced the pursuit of minimally invasive robotic surgery for prostate cancer.  In 2003, there were an estimated 617 minimally invasive robotic prostatectomies (MIRPs) performed in the United States and by 2009, that number increased to 37,753. In 2005, patients were twice as likely to experience an adverse event if they were undergoing MIRPs compared to a…

Researchers at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) in Mexico have developed a cDNA microarray chip that allows detection of the RNA strand of the dengue fever virus. The genetic information pinpoints the exact serotype of malaria that an infected person or mosquito is carrying  and allows analysis of the complementary strand of DNA (cDNA) obtained from the dengue fever virus being carried by the infected patient. The cDNA is covalently linked to a slide (substrate) that can be a glass or paper. Through probes marked with fluorescent elements, called fluorochromes,…

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on Science 2.0 in order to gauge the trend towards a more open, data-driven and people-focused way of doing research and innovation.  As anyone who is a member knows, Science 2.0 was founded in 2006 on four fundamental concepts: modernizing collaboration, participation, communication and publication. This synthesis was in the works for a while, of course. Before we came up with Science 2.0, open access publication had already been successful, with arXiv, BMC and PLOS all taking journals out of the subscription world and making…

So the USA lost to Belgium in the World Cup elimination round. I predicted a win for the US for a simple reason - Belgium, I said, does not know how good it is, whereas the US does.  That's fuzzy logic, right? Well, that is what a lot of sports analysis is, because analysis at its heart relies on subjective scouting. Pundits can pretend to science it up all they want, but they are just doing a Bayes analysis based on real results after they happen. Something like a 68% chance of a victory is useless in the real world unless you are a bookie. It sounds science-y, but sports is a 0 or a 1…