Here is what I am reading today:
“As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally. “
“A strong brain response was also associated with increased weight (BMI), but only in individuals reporting low levels of self-control on a questionnaire. For those reporting high levels of self-control a stronger brain response to food was actually related to a lower BMI.”
“Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.
“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology1.”
” It doesn’t matter what we’ve experienced — whether it’s the breathtaking scope of the Grand Canyon, the ethereal beauty of the Aurora Borealis, or the exhilarating view from the top of the Eiffel Tower — at some point in our lives we’ve all had the feeling of being in a complete and overwhelming sense of awe”
“What do you get when you dissect 10 000 fruit-fly larvae? A team of researchers led by the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK and the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (MPI) in Freiburg, Germany has discovered a way in which cells can adjust the activity of many different genes at once. Their findings, published in the journal Science, overturn commonly held views and reveal an important mechanism behind sex differences.”
