The new digital tools for scientific research
Whether you’re a student, researcher or engineer, you’ve probably mastered to perfection certain IT tools: PowerPoint, word processing software, electronic messaging. Other, less well known tools exist, each with a specific use. In research, as in many fields, it is important to organize one’s time and to use relevant, well-adapted tools. Do you need to organize your bibliographic search, exchange large files, or optimize your work as a team? The newcomers to help you with this are called ResearcherID, Figshare, Prezi and Sozi… Do you know them? Read on for a look at the digital tools to use for your scientific research.
Face Transplants Bring Whole New Lives
Last month, the most extensive face transplant to date took place at the University of Maryland Medical Center, providing the patient with new tissue from the scalp to the neck, along with teeth, both jaws, and part of the tongue. This young procedure has already succeeded in giving back the lives of severely disfigured people. For them, living in isolation, hiding behind masks, unable to speak or eat normally, the chance to receive a functional, new face is the opportunity to live again. Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, who has performed some of the U.S.’s first face transplants, including the first full-face procedure in March 2011, describes some of the advances that have made this medical achievement possible and the huge impact on patients’ lives.
Farm Shellfish, Feed the World
As farmland and fresh water become scarcer, and the global population continues to increase, the farming of aquatic species, or aquaculture, may see an expansion of its role in feeding humanity. Important in this will be keeping the cultures disease-free and maximizing their production; highly specialized research in these areas could have a broad impact on countless daily lives. Two scientists recount not only the importance of this work, but the pleasure they take in doing it.
GMOs Against Malaria? OECD Weighs the Risks
Genetically modified organisms have been discussed extensively regarding crop plants, but this is not the only class of species that researchers are manipulating in the hope of producing new characteristics, beneficial to humans. The fight against infectious, insect-borne diseases, like malaria, may finally find solutions here via the contributions of modified bacteria. This week in Paris, the OECD held a conference on the Environmental Uses of Micro-Organisms to consider the risks associated with the release of such altered microorganisms into the environment. Some can be assessed today, but others may be impossible to evaluate until the organisms are already out there.
BATS: Between Fear and Passion
Bats have long suffered from an undeservedly bad reputation, stemming from largely unfounded fears. Rabies, for example, is often associated with bats, and yet, over 15 years in the U.S., an average of just two people per year died of bat-related rabies. Rarely do we hear of the services provided by bats: controlling pests and disease, pollinating plants, spreading seeds… Threatened by habitat loss, bats are moving out of their forests and into cities. Recognizing their important role, researchers aim to understand how they adapt to this new ecosystem and how humans can help.
Meditation and Folding of the Brain: A new link?
A new study has found that the brains of people who meditate show greater folding, with more peaks and valleys, than those of people who don’t. The region most significantly implicated plays a role that may, indeed, be involved in meditation. If this practice can be shown to cause the neural differences observed, meditation may provide a method to protect the brain from some aspects of aging, in addition to the benefits it is already known to have.
Influence Communication in South East Asia
This paper seeks to present how digital communication contributes to modifying processes of popular influence, activism and lobbying on companies and governments in East Asia civil societies. It will be guided by identifying methods, trends and similar behavior to westerns countries. It is an anthropological view of communication issues.
3D Molecular Models, Humanitarian Role Models
Adding to the effects of poverty and limited access to medical care, civil unrest and movement of large populations exacerbate public health problems in the developing world. The parasitic disease leishmaniasis has decimated refugee populations in Africa more than once. Although neglected, for the most part, by drug developers, researchers are seeking more effective treatments, using computer simulations to reveal the structure of individual proteins that they hope to make the parasite’s Achilles heel.
Rewinding Copenhagen, Students Invent Climate Solutions
Over the course of five days of simulated, but, nevertheless, intense, negotiations last June, more than 150 master’s students resurrected the 2009 United Nations climate conference. Beyond learning about UN procedure, the reenactment allowed them to feel personally the struggle of negotiating the future of the planet and to innovate new solutions, which may indeed find a place in global climate programs.
Measuring the Meter: an Error that Changed the World
In the midst of the French revolution, two scientists were charged by the revolutionary government to measure a quadrant of a meridian arc of the Earth. This universal length would then be the basis for a new measurement system, used today by over 95% of the world: the metric system. This seven-year adventure shows that tenacity, self-confidence and errors were part of the building of early science.
