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Submission + - Nobel Winners Exemplify Israel's "Brain Drain" Problem (reuters.com) 2

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: Two of the three scientists sharing this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry have Israeli citizenship, with Dr. Arieh Warshel having been born and educated in Israel, yet both are based at universities in the United States. These two scientists are perhaps the highest profile examples of a growing problem in the so-called "start-up nation," which is known for its high-tech tech companies and scientific innovation, and yet which loses more researchers to emigration than any other western nation. The problem? Large salary gaps between US and Israeli institutions. As Daniel Hershkowitz, president of Bar-Ilan University put it, "I don't see Israel being able to compete with what they offer in the United States."

Submission + - When is it ok to not give notice? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here in the U.S., "being professional" means giving at least two week's notice when leaving a job. Is this an outmoded notion? We've all heard stories about (or perhaps experienced) a quick escort to the parking lot upon giving the normal notice, and I've never heard of a company giving a two week notice to an employee that's being laid off or fired.
A generation ago, providing a lengthy notice was required to get a glowing reference, but these days does a reference hold water any more?
Once you're reached the point where you know it's time to leave, under what circumstances would you just up and walk out or give only a short notice?

Submission + - Bone-Eating Worms Found in Antarctic Waters (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When you drop a whale backbone into Antarctic waters and retrieve it a year later, you’ll find it covered with a pelt of wriggling, rosy-hued worms. Drop a chunk of wood in the same spot, and you’ll discover that it’s hardly changed. That’s the result of a simple experiment to find out if some of the world's weirdest worms also live in Antarctic waters. The discovery extends the range of bone-eating worms to the Southern Ocean and suggests that Antarctic shipwrecks may be remarkably intact.

Submission + - Plants communicate using fungi (bytesizebio.net)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: In response to aphid attacks, some plants produce chemicals that repel the aphids and attract wasps, the aphids' natural enemies. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have shown that plants attacked by aphids can communicate that information to neighboring plants via existing networks of fungi in the soil. Thus fungal symbiosis with plants is shown to be taken one step further: not only do they provide nutrients to plants, they also function as communication hardware.

Submission + - New Links Found between Bacteria and Cancer (bytesizebio.net)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: A recent study by a group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that bacterial DNA gets transferred to human cells, in a process known as lateral gene transfer, or LGT. LGT is known to occur quite commonly between bacteria, including bacteria of different species. In fact, that is how antibiotic resistance is transferred so quickly. The team has shown that certain types of tumor cells acquire bacterial DNA that may play a role in tumor progression. Another group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has shown that gut inflammation leads to a radical change in the microbial population there, which encourages growth of E. coli that can disrupt the inflamed cells' DNA, leading to cancer. Both studies enable us to ask new questions such as: how does inflammation change the landscape for bacterial colonization? Can bacteria indeed harness inflammation — and then cancer — to flourish and remove competitors from their newly found ecosystem? And can we use this information to fight cancer?

Submission + - Congress Becomes Aware of Patent Trolls

Submitted by phantomfive
phantomfive writes: Congressman Charles Schumer has written a piece decrying the evils of patent trolls. "Because of the high cost of patent litigation—the average litigation defense costs a small or midsize company $1.75 million—it is often marginally cheaper for a defendant to pay up front to make the case go away. The average settlement for the same group of companies is $1.33 million....Patent trolls cost U.S. companies $29 billion in 2011 alone."
His solution? Make it easier for low quality patents to be re-examined and rejected by the patent office.

Submission + - Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back as The Terminator

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to movies after his role as Governator of California and the legendary actor is all set to play the role of The Terminator once again — the character which turned him into an icon. Schwarzenegger told the fan site TheArnoldFans.com, "I'm very happy that the studios want me to be in Terminator 5 and to star as the Terminator."

Submission + - Terrible advice from a great scientist

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: E.O. Wilson is the renowned father of sociobiology, a professor (emeritus) at Harvard, two time pulitzer prize winner, and a popularizer of science. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Wilson provides controversial advice to aspiring young scientists. Wilson claims that math literacy is not essential, and that scientific models in biology, intuitively generated, can later be formalized by a specialized statistician. One blogger calls out Wilson on his article, arguing that knowing mathematics is essential to generating models, and that lacking what Darwin called the "extra sense" is essentially limiting to any scientist.
Open Source

Submission + - What does it actually cost to publish a scientific paper? (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders.
Quoting from the piece: "The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think,” agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality." There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that "Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible."
Privacy

Submission + - Raytheon's Riot program mines social network data for intelligence agencies (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: Raytheon has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites according to this story from The Guardian.

An "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients. But the company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
Biotech

Submission + - International challenge to computationally interpret protein function (muohio.edu)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: We live in the post-genomic era, when DNA sequence data is growing exponentially. However, for most of the genes that we identify, we have no idea of their biological functions. They are like words in a foreign language, waiting to be deciphered. The Critical Assessment of Function Annotation, or CAFA, is a new community-wide experiment to assess the performance of the multitude of computational methods developed by research groups worldwide to help channel the flood of data from genome research to deduce the function of proteins.

Thirty research groups participated in the first CAFA, presenting a total of 54 algorithms. The results are published in an article in Nature Methods. The researchers participated in blind-test experiments in which they predicted the function of protein sequences for which the functions are already known but haven't yet been made publicly available. Independent assessors then judged their performance. The challenge organizers explain that: 'The accurate annotation of protein function is key to understanding life at the molecular level and has great biochemical and pharmaceutical implications, explain the study authors; however, with its inherent difficulty and expense, experimental characterization of function cannot scale up to accommodate the vast amount of sequence data already available.The computational annotation of protein function has therefore emerged as a problem at the forefront of computational and molecular biology.'
Biotech

Submission + - ROSALIND: an addictive bioinformatics learning site (bytesizebio.net)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: Bioinformatics science which deals with the study of methods for storing, retrieving and analyzing molecular biology data. Byte Size Biology writes about ROSALIND, a cool concept in learning bioinformatics, similar to Project Euler. You are given problems of increasing difficulty to solve. Start with nucleotide counting (trivial) and end with genome assembly (putting it mildly, not so trivial). To solve a problem, you download a sample data set, write your code and debug it. Once you think you are ready, you have a time limit to solve and provide an answer for the actual problem dataset. If you mess up, there is a timed new dataset to download. This thing is coder-addictive. Currently in Beta, but a lot of fun and seems stable.

Submission + - TSA Bodyscanner Fail Video - Now with Surveillance Camera Footage! (wordpress.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Jonathan Corbett, the subject of the earlier Slashdot Story "The Ineffectiveness of TSA Body Scanners" (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/07/0329255/the-ineffectiveness-of-tsa-body-scanners), has an update for us.

His video showing him wandering through a nude body scanner with undetected objects is now complete with the feeds from TSA's security cameras at the checkpoint.

Good work Jonathan and thank you TSA for your timely response to his Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request!
Books

Submission + - Best Science Fiction/Fantasy for 8 Year Olds 7

Submitted by Jason Levine
Jason Levine writes: My son is 8 years old. I'd love to get him interested in Science Fiction, but most of the books I can think of seem to be targeted to older kids/adults.

Thinking that the length of some novels might be off-putting to him, I read him some of the short stories in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot". He liked these but I could tell he was having a hard time keeping up. I think the wording of the stories was too advanced and there was too much talking and not enough action. Personally, I love Asimov, but I think much of it just went over his head.

Which science fiction and/or fantasy books would you recommend for an 8 year old? (Either stories he could read himself or that we could read together over the course of a few weeks.)

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