Craig Venter redux….

His latest venture with Peter Diamandis is of course aimed at massive scale sequencing, story here. All in service of the larger goal: extended life.

I first met Craig in the late 1980’s and learned quickly to never underestimate his ability to deliver the goods, so we wish him well in the new enterprise.

The evolution of human culture was about heterogenous responses to infectious disease….

Ethan Watters excellent long piece in Pacific Standard is here. The basic notion: our cultural mores result from different behavioral solutions to societal stress from infectious disease.  The author of this idea is University of New Mexico’s Randy Thornhill who is an evolutionary biologist. Thornhill has a new book coming out soon: The Parasite-stress Theory of Values and Sociality: Infectious Disease, History and Human Values Worldwide New York, NY: Springer. It looks like it’ll be a good read.

Bad news for fusion energy…

And it’s on the management side. Story here. The New Yorker’s website has the executive summary of a very damning report here. This is an example of Big Science, gone awry as a result of:

“a lack of strong project management culture …[that led to] protracted debates and impeded rapid progress. There has been too much focus on achieving organizational “harmony” instead of tangible project management results. The MAT was unable to observe a sense of urgency, a “passion” for success, a commitment to rapidly finding solutions for every problem, or an agile and nimble project organization. Too often, the culture lacked a “constructive confrontation” component between staff and management, and even between managers. As a result, many of the best ideas were never heard nor expressed and key decisions lacked ownership.”

Elephants and their brains….

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution, the Scientific American link is here. Money quote on how Elephants get their high cognitive capabilities without the sheer numbers of neocortical neurons that we have:

Benjamin Hart of the University of California Davis has speculated that the elephant cortex derives its intellectual prowess not from local density but from widespread interconnectivity. He suspects that, whereas the human and chimpanzee brains have evolved many tight-knit networks of nearby neurons throughout the cortex—akin to states packed with highly populous cities—the elephant brain has favored lengthy connections between far-flung brain areas, building the equivalent of an extensive cross-country railroad system. For now, though, this is mostly hypothetical.

This relates to some of my own work with my graduate student David Cooper, see here [pdf].

Replication problem workshop at NSF

NSF SBE Workshop on Replication Last Week

Thursday and Friday of last week I attended an extraordinary gathering of scientists to discuss the issue of replicability in scientific research, a subject matter this blog has covered often.

The University of Chicago’s John Cacioppo chaired the NSF workshop. You can see him at the head of the table and the attendee list included representatives from the White House, federal funding agencies and scientific journals–among others.

What I’m pleased to report is how serious the discussion was. There was a clear realization that, as scientists, this is something we’ve got to get ahead of and more importantly get right.

I’ll continue to report on the issue and specifically will have more to say about workshop itself in future blogposts. In the meantime, I heard two self-explanatory terms for the first time: p-hacking and academic risk hedging. I leave it to loyal readers to ponder their significance.

Do Swiss moves on immigration put Human Brain Project funding at risk?

As readers may know, last week Switzerland put itself at potential loggerheads with the European Union over the issue of immigration. Switzerland is not a member of the EU, but is very highly integrated with Brussels over a host of issues not the least science R&D support. Here from ScienceInsider is a report that Swiss participation in Horizon 2020 funding may now be at risk. Most neuroscientist readers are aware that the huge Human Brain Project (funded at $1.6B equivalent) receives its support from Horizon 2020. And of course, it’s led by Henry Markram of EPFL (in Switzerland).

Time will tell….

$1B Climate Resiliency Fund….

That’s what President Obama is proposing. ScienceInsider story here. Related PCAST report is here [President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for our international readers].

There are a lot of questions of course. First, can the President get this out of Congress?  Second, to what extent does this represent new money (rather than re-labeled dollars)? Third, how much of the $1B would go towards climate science?