Filters Blog

Odd as it sounds, adding wishy-washy members to a group can wrest control from a strongly opinionated minority and make collective decisions more democratic.

At least that’s what happened in an experiment with schooling fish and three kinds of computer simulations described in the Dec. 16 Science. “Quite counter-intuitive,” says study coauthor Iain Couzin of Princeton University. “What we’re trying to do with this paper is put out a new idea.”

Couzin is not arguing that there’s a benefit to a poorly informed inkjet filters electorate. But he does call for experiments to clarify the role that uninformed people with no opinion on a choice play in human consensus building.

The study “supports a growing body of evidence that larger groups are better decision makers than smaller groups,” says applied mathematician David Sumpter at the University of Uppsala in Sweden who studies collective behavior.

It also echoes economic research showing that having some fraction of uninformed traders in a market can reduce volatility, says Michael Kearns, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who is interested in collective behavior.

The fish study grew out of computer simulations imaje inkjet filters Couzin created that demonstrated the considerable power of opinionated minorities in otherwise indifferent groups, flocks or herds. When he mixed factions with different strengths of opinion in this simulation, as well as in two very different analyses of group behavior, he found hints of peculiar effects of uninformed parties.

Membrane Solutions, a US developer of advanced membrane products for water and wastewater treatment applications, has developed two new membrane products for the global water treatment marketplace, the FEDI fractional electrodionization (EDI) and Q-SEP hollow fibre ultrafiltration modules.

Agilent Technologies has launched the Agilent 2200 TapeStation to automate next-generation sequencing sample and library quality control. The benchtop instrument comes with prepackaged, ready-to-use ScreenTape consumables and is compatible with 16-tube strip vials and 96-well plates.

Chinese genome center BGI has released several new or updated bioinformatics applications, pipelines, and software tools.

They include an updated SOAP package, available here, with SOAP3, a short read aligner; SOAPindel, an indel finder; SAPfusion, a gene fusion detector; SOAPsplice, a splice-junction detector; SOAPdenovo-Trans, a de novo transcriptome assembler; and Metacluster 4.0, a binning solving tool for metagenomics.

Also available are cloud-based analysis software tools for next-gen data analysis, such as GAMA to estimate allele frequency and GSNP for SNP detection; and Adam to sort and remove duplicate reads. In addition, BGI released Hecate 2 and Gaea 2, updated versions of de novo assembly and resequencing analysis tools.

BGI has also launched GigaDB, a publicly available database that houses large-scale genomic datasets from a variety of organisms, including E. coli, foxtail millet, potato, Chinese cabbage, cucumber, pigeonpea, sorghum, ants, roundworm, naked mole rat, sheep, silkworm, Tibetan antelope, and human. Each dataset is assigned a digital object identifier. GigaDB is affiliated with GigaScience, a new research journal published by BGI and BioMed Central.

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The computational biology group at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory and the Rinn Lab at the Harvard University department of stem cells and regenerative medicine have released CummeRbund, an R/Bioconductor package that simplifies the organization, access, exploration, and visualization of the various output files of a Cuffdiff differential expression analysis. The software is freely available under the OSI approved Artistic License 2.0 and can be downloaded here.

In addition, CummeRbund has been included as part of the new R/Bioconductor v2.9 release and can be installed in a similar manner to standard Bioconductor packages.

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Genedata has released Genedata Expressionist 7.0 for Genomic Profiling. The system simultaneously analyzes transcriptomics, copy number variation, variant, and DNA methylation data. It includes a genome browser that can visualize terabytes of data and provide real-time feedback at every processing step.

Some of the mysterious, high-energy cosmic rays that bombard Earth may hatch from a colossal, gassy superbubble carved into space by hyperactive young stars in the Cygnus X region of the sky.

Cosmic rays are actually subatomic particles — mostly protons petri dish and electrons — that zip across space, perhaps spurred to nearly light-speed by supernova shockwaves or stellar winds. Because they’re charged, the particles are bounced around by magnetic fields during their journies, making it difficult to follow their paths back to the beginning. “It’s like trying to cross a Jacuzzi,” says Grenier, of the University of Paris Diderot.

To get around this wandering particle problem, Grenier and the team decided to track gamma rays, which are produced when cosmic rays collide 96 well plates with interstellar particles and which the team could use to trace the rays’ origins. The team aimed the space-based Fermi Large Area Telescope toward Cygnus, hoping to spy a telltale glimmer from gamma rays inside the region’s superbubble, which is more than 100 light-years across and contains more than 500 massive stars.

MANILA, Philippines – Providing innovative technology in more than 60 countries, 3M has been bringing to Filipino homes efficient products in home improvement. One of these is Filtrete, the product that seeks to answer the country’s need to improve air quality in the homes through a pioneering air filtering technology.

Around 18 million Filipinos live in cities with unhealthy levels of airborne particulate matter, especially in the most populous metropolitan area in the country, Metro Manila.

“Filtrete will make your home your safe haven where you can breathe, easy amid the ruckus and pollution outside your home,” shares Vivian Faustino, home and office business division head, 3M Philippines.

With an immediate need to clean the air Filipino families breathe especially where they live, electronic air cleaners that seem to cost a fortune and difficult to maintain, a more effective and convenient method of purifying air is a new necessity. Now, with the Filtrete Air Condition Filters, a cleaner and healthier home for Filipinos is possible and easier to have.

Turn your air conditioning unit into an instant air cleaner with Filtrete. Its filtering material prevents growth of bacteria, molds, mildew, or fungi, capturing harmful particulate matter that usually just pass through other regular air filters, reducing the risk for allergic reactions, asthma attacks, and other respiratory problems, making it highly encouraged and recommended by the American Lung Association as the brand of choice when it comes to air filtering needs.

Filtrete’s Electrostatic Fibres are a groundbreaking innovation in air filtration with positively and negatively charged media that act like magnets, trapping microparticles ranging from 100 large to the smallest 0.001 microns.

“3M takes pride in continuously innovating and improving our products to improve the homes of many Filipinos. Going beyond just home improvement to air improvement, 3M becomes a key player in promoting good health in the country. We look forward to providing Filipino homes all over the country with the opportunity to breathe a little bit easier with 3M’s Filtrete,” says Faustino.

A sense-mixing condition in which people taste colors or see smells tends to run in families, and recent studies have homed in on a selection of genes that may contribute to the phenomenon, called synesthesia. Understanding the condition’s genetic basis might reveal why it has perpetuated in humans and help scientists develop cures for degenerative neurological diseases.

Only about 3 percent of the population claim to experience some form of synesthesia, but nearly half of those report having a close family member 96 well plates whose senses become similarly entangled. “We know that synesthesia tends to travel in families,” says experimental psychologist David Brang of the University of California, San Diego who, along with V.S. Ramachandran, discusses synesthesia genetics in an article published online.

But children often exhibit different forms of synesthesia than do their parents. This “complicates the picture and hints at the idea that more than one gene is involved,” says Brang.

A recent study led by neuroscientist David Eagleman from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston zeroed in on a region on chromosome 16, which he and his colleagues believe holds the gene responsible for the most common form of the condition, colored sequence petri dish synesthesia (where letters and numbers are associated with a specific color). “We don’t know which gene it is yet, but we’re getting closer every day,” says Eagleman, who published his findings September 30 in Behavioural Brain Research.

It’s possible that the gene Eagleman’s group and others are searching for helps “prune” connections in the brain, Brang suggests. Synesthesia may result from a defect in such a gene, leading to insufficient regulation or removal of the brain’s many neural bridges. “It could be that everyone is born with global connectivity in the brain, and over time most undergo a refining process,” says Brang. Synesthetes may retain pathways linking different parts of the brain that most people shut down as they get older.

A new system to ensure wastewater from maintenance excavation is as clean as possible before being discharged has been introduced by Electricity distributor UK Power Networks.

Scientists at Chalmers have succeeded in creating light from vacuum — observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum.

The experiment is based on one of the most counterintuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics in petri dish: that vacuum is by no means empty nothingness. In fact, the vacuum is full of various particles that are continuously fluctuating in and out of existence. They appear, exist for a brief moment and then disappear again. Since their existence is so fleeting, they are usually referred to as virtual particles.

Chalmers scientist, Christopher Wilson and his co-workers have succeeded in getting photons to leave their virtual state and become real photons, i.e. measurable light. The physicist Moore predicted way back in 1970 that this should happen if the virtual photons are allowed to bounce off a mirror that is moving at a speed that is almost as high as the speed of light. The phenomenon, known as the dynamical Casimir effect 96 well plates, has now been observed for the first time in a brilliant experiment conducted by the Chalmers scientists.

“Since it’s not possible to get a mirror to move fast enough, we’ve developed another method for achieving the same effect,” explains Per Delsing, Professor of Experimental Physics at Chalmers. “Instead of varying the physical distance to a mirror, we’ve varied the electrical distance to an electrical short circuit that acts as a mirror for microwaves.”