Complexity Digest 2008.03

17-Jan-2008

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Content

  1. The Coevolution Of Choosiness And Cooperation, Nature
    1. Runaway Social Selection For Displays Of Partner Value And Altruism, Biol. Theory
  2. The Limits of Counting: Numerical Cognition Between Evolution and Culture, Science
    1. Culture Influences Brain Function, ScienceDaily
  3. Creating A Web Of Worlds, Technology Review
    1. Semantic Web Takes Big Step Forward, InfoWorld
  4. Life From Scratch - Learning To Make Synthetic Cells, Science News
    1. 10-Fold Life Span Extension Reported, USC News
  5. My Nose, My Brain, My Faith, Time
    1. Smile - And The World Can Hear You, Innovations-report
    2. Lend Me Your Ears - And The World Will Sound Very Different, Innovations-report
  6. Observational Learning In Chimpanzees And Children Studied Through ‘Ghost' Conditions, Proc. Biol. Sc.
  7. Is Sociality Associated With High Longevity In North American Birds?, Biol. Lett.
    1. Conservation Biology: Cats, Rats And Seabirds, Nature
  8. Monkey's Thoughts Propel Robot, a Step That May Help Humans, NY Times
    1. Self-Paced Brain-Computer Interface Gets Closer to Reality, PhysOrg.com
  9. Cell Biology: Bacteria's New Bones, Nature
  10. Researchers Find New Way To Block Destructive Rush Of Immune Cells, PhysOrg.com
  11. Iron Nanobeads Can Control Immune System, New Scientist
    1. Nanomagnetic Actuation Of Receptor-Mediated Signal Transduction, Nature Nanotechnology
  12. Cancer Immunology: Cancer's Bulwark Against Immune Attack: MDS Cells, Science
    1. Gene Therapy Cancers Prompt Design of Safer Virus, Science Now
    2. T-Cell 'Nanotubes' May Explain How HIV Virus Conquers Human Immune System, PhysOrg.com
  13. Molecular Biology: RNA Rules, Nature
    1. Endogenous Human MicroRNAs That Suppress Breast Cancer Metastasis, Nature
  14. Cancer: A Few to Flip the Angiogenic Switch, Science
    1. Endothelial Progenitor Cells Control the Angiogenic Switch in Mouse Lung Metastasis, Science
    2. Cancer: Quo Vadis, Specificity?, Science
  15. Geophysics: What Triggers Tremor?, Science
    1. Brain 'Seismology' Helps Predict Epileptic Attacks, New Scientist
  16. Physics: The Force Of Fluctuations, Nature
    1. Quantum Mechanics: Evolution Stopped In Its Tracks, Nature
  17. Small Infinity, Big Infinity - Infinity Can Be Big Or Bigger, Countable Or Not, Science News
  18. Breakthrough Promises 40-Hour Laptop Batteries, ZDNet Australia
    1. Energy Forest, Science News
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. FBI Wants Instant Access To British Identity Data - Americans Seek International Database To Carry Iris, Palm And Finger Prints
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. The Coevolution Of Choosiness And Cooperation, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Explaining the rise and maintenance of cooperation is central to our understanding of biological systems and human societies. When an individual's cooperativeness is used by other individuals as a choice criterion, there can be competition to be more generous than others, a situation called competitive altruism. The evolution of cooperation between non-relatives can then be driven by a positive feedback between increasing levels of cooperativeness and choosiness.

    1. Runaway Social Selection For Displays Of Partner Value And Altruism, Biol. Theory Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Runaway social selection resulting from partner choice may have shaped aspects of human cooperation and complex sociality that are otherwise hard to account for. Social selection is the subtype of natural selection that results from the social behaviors of other individuals. Competition to be chosen as a social partner can, like competition to be chosen as a mate, result in runaway selection that shapes extreme traits. People prefer partners who display valuable resources and bestow them selectively on close partners. The resulting phenotypic covariance between displays and preferences gives fitness advantages to both, creating runaway selection (...).

  2. The Limits of Counting: Numerical Cognition Between Evolution and Culture, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Number words that, in principle, allow all kinds of objects to be counted ad infinitum are one basic requirement for complex numerical cognition. Accordingly, short or object-specific counting sequences in a language are often regarded as earlier steps in the evolution from premathematical conceptions to greater abstraction. We present some instances from Melanesia and Polynesia, whose short or object-specific sequences originated from the same extensive and abstract sequence. F

    1. Culture Influences Brain Function, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind. Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns? To find out, (...) asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments (...).

  3. Creating A Web Of Worlds, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Web worlds: Metaplace wants to enable its users to build virtual worlds, such as the one shown above, that could exist anywhere on the Web. Credit: Metaplace
    With Metaplace, designers can build worlds using a markup language, style sheets, modules, and a scripting language. Every world acts like a Web server, Koster says, and every object in a world has a URL. What this means for users of these worlds is that they can move seamlessly from the rest of the Web into the virtual world and back again, he says. A user can browse to any object in a Metaplace world from outside, and every object can be linked to the rest of the Web and exchange information with Web services.

    1. Semantic Web Takes Big Step Forward, InfoWorld Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: W3C will announce publication of SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle") query technology, a Semantic Web component enabling people to focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used to store data, W3C said. (...)

      The goal of the Semantic Web is to serve as a giant set of databases that can be integrated, Jacobs said. The Semantic Web has seen a lot of uptake in the health care and life sciences, he said. The drug discovery and pharmaceutical fields can use it to take clinical results and learn from data, according to Jacobs.

  4. Life From Scratch - Learning To Make Synthetic Cells, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    COPY THIS? Coaxing synthetic cells into building ribosomes, the complex structures that convert genetic code into functional proteins, is a major challenge for those attempting to create cells in the lab. Sanbonmatsu Team, Los Alamos National Laboratory
    Maggots don't arise spontaneously out of dead, rotting meat. Aphids never materialize within drops of morning dew. Aristotle and others who believed in the spontaneous generation of life were dead wrong. (...)

    Synthia would be an important scientific milestone, but it would still be only partially synthetic.

    The genome would be human-made, but the membrane enclosing the cell and the complex blend of proteins in the cell body would have come from the living bacterium that received the injected genome.

    1. 10-Fold Life Span Extension Reported, USC News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Biologists have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years without apparent side effects.

      The basic but important discovery, achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings science closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of all living systems: the cell.

      "We're setting the foundation for reprogramming healthy life." said USC study leader Valter Longo.

  5. My Nose, My Brain, My Faith, Time Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Illustration for TIME by Jon Krause
    (...) Harris presented 14 people with 360 statements designed to elicit belief, disbelief or uncertainty. He tracked their brain response with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and got some very revealing results. Statements like "2 + 2 = 5" and "Torture is good" caused an area called the anterior insula to light up. True statements like "2 + 2 = 4" activated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial is thought to play a role in judgment, memory, fear and, according to one study, soft-drink preferences. The anterior insula helps process fear, disgust and reactions to bad smells.

    1. Smile - And The World Can Hear You, Innovations-report Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone, according to a study by scientists at the University of Portsmouth. The research, which also suggested that some people have "smilier" voices than others, adds to the growing body of evidence that smiling and other expressions pack a strong informational punch and may even impact us on a subliminal level. "When we listen to people speaking we may be picking up on all sorts of cues, even unconsciously, which help us to interpret the speaker," said (...).

    2. Lend Me Your Ears - And The World Will Sound Very Different, Innovations-report Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Recognising people, objects or animals by the sound they make is an important survival skill and something most of us take for granted. But very similar objects can physically make very dissimilar sounds and we are able to pick up subtle clues about the identity and source of the sound. Scientists (...) are working out how the human ear and the brain come together to help us understand our acoustic environment. They have found that the part of the brain that deals with sound, the auditory cortex, is adapted in each individual and tuned to the world around us. (...)

  6. Observational Learning In Chimpanzees And Children Studied Through ‘Ghost' Conditions, Proc. Biol. Sc. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Emulation has been distinguished from imitation as a form of observational learning because it focuses not on the model's actions but on the action's environmental results. Whether a species emulates, imitates or displays only simpler observational learning is expected to have profound implications for its capacity for cultural transmission. Chimpanzees' observational learning has been suggested to be primarily emulative, but this is an inference largely based upon low fidelity copying in experiments when comparing chimpanzees with humans rather than direct testing. Here we test directly for emulation learning by chimpanzees and children using a ‘ghost' condition (...).

  7. Is Sociality Associated With High Longevity In North American Birds?, Biol. Lett. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Sociality, as a life-history trait, should be associated with high longevity because complex sociality is characterized by reproductive suppression, delayed breeding, increased care and survival, and some of these traits select for high longevity. We studied the relationship between cooperative parental care (a proxy of complex sociality) and relative maximum lifespan in 257 North American bird species. (...) we found no significant effect of cooperative care on longevity in analyses of species-specific data or phylogenetically independent standardized linear contrasts. Thus, sociality itself is not associated with high longevity. Rather, longevity is correlated with increased body size, survival rate and age of first reproduction.

    1. Conservation Biology: Cats, Rats And Seabirds, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Cats kill birds, and therefore eradicating cats from an island would seem to be a good strategy for protecting the native population of seabirds. But that thinking does not take account of ecological complications. (...)

      Using a 35-year data set, they show empirically that the eradication of cats from Little Barrier Island, an oceanic island off the coast of New Zealand's North Island, led to a severe decrease in the breeding success of the resident seabird, a burrowing species called Cook's petrel (...). The reason, it seems, was an explosion in the number of rats, which tend to prey on the petrel chicks and eggs, and which resulted from the absence of cats.

  8. Monkey's Thoughts Propel Robot, a Step That May Help Humans, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Moving by Thought
    The signals from Idoya's brain sent to the robot, and the video of the robot sent back to Idoya, were relayed in less than a quarter of a second, he said. That was so fast that the robot's movements meshed with the monkey's experience.

    An hour into the experiment, the researchers pulled a trick on Idoya. They stopped her treadmill. Everyone held their breath. What would Idoya do?

    ¡§Her eyes remained focused like crazy on CB's legs,¡¨ Dr. Nicolelis said.

    She got treats galore. The robot kept walking. And the researchers were jubilant.

    1. Self-Paced Brain-Computer Interface Gets Closer to Reality, PhysOrg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Data from a sample EEG is measured from one second before to one second after a decision point. The data is used to classify the neurological phenomena when making a decision. Credit: Fatourechi, et al.
      To test the abilities of a self-paced BCI, researchers often ask volunteers to perform a specific mental activity, such as to attempt to move their right index finger. The system then tries to detect the changes in the brain signals related to this mental activity (called neurological phenomenon) and map them into a control command for the device

  9. Cell Biology: Bacteria's New Bones, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Bacteria appear to have sophisticated internal structures that give them shape, and help them grow and divide.J. IWASA
    Long dismissed as featureless, disorganized sacks, bacteria are now revealing a multitude of elegant internal structures. Ewen Callaway investigates a new field in cell biology.

    (...) was toying with a strange bacterial protein known as MreB. Take it away from microbes, and they lose their characteristic cylindrical shape. The protein's obvious role in structure and even its sequence suggested a shared ancestry with actin, a protein that produces vast, fibrous networks in complex cells, forming the framework of their internal structure, or cytoskeleton.

  10. Researchers Find New Way To Block Destructive Rush Of Immune Cells, PhysOrg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Researchers have found a way to selectively block the ability of white blood cells to "crawl" toward the sites of injury and infection when such mobility drives disease, according to a study published today in The Journal of Experimental Medicine. The results suggest a new treatment approach for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and multiple sclerosis, and for conditions made worse by misplaced inflammation, like atherosclerosis, stroke and transplant rejection, researchers said.

  11. Iron Nanobeads Can Control Immune System, New Scientist Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Rat cells' immune response has been switched on and off with a magnetic field - a technique that could control treatment of allergies and other illnesses more precisely.

    Donald Ingber's team at the Children's Hospital in Boston created iron nanobeads that bind to receptor molecules on the surface of immune cells taken from rats. When exposed to a magnetic field, the beads cluster together, pulling the receptors with them. Changes to the receptors due to aggregation set off a series of chemical reactions that trigger the cell's immune response (...).

    1. Nanomagnetic Actuation Of Receptor-Mediated Signal Transduction, Nature Nanotechnology Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Complex cell behaviours are triggered by chemical ligands that bind to membrane receptors and alter intracellular signal transduction. However, future biosensors, medical devices and other microtechnologies that incorporate living cells as system components will require actuation mechanisms that are much more rapid, robust, non-invasive and easily integrated with solid-state interfaces. Here we describe a magnetic nanotechnology that activates a biochemical signalling mechanism normally switched on by binding of multivalent chemical ligands. Superparamagnetic 30-nm beads, (...)

  12. Cancer Immunology: Cancer's Bulwark Against Immune Attack: MDS Cells, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: For decades, researchers have been engaged in a frustrating effort to harness the power of the immune system to fight cancer. The approach works well enough in test tubes and experimental animals. Many types of cancer cells are studded with antigens that distinguish them from normal cells, and activated immune cells can seek out these targets and kill the cells that carry them. Yet attempts to destroy tumors by sparking similar responses in human patients, using so-called cancer vaccines and other immunotherapies, have largely ended in failure.

    1. Gene Therapy Cancers Prompt Design of Safer Virus, Science Now Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The problem with the virus used in the U.K. and French studies seemed to be its powerful promoter, a stretch of DNA that regulates expression of the inserted gene, IL2RG. This promoter also apparently turned on a nearby cancer gene. To eliminate this problem, U.K. study leader Adrian Thrasher and colleagues replaced the promoter with one less likely to turn on other genes. This "self-inactivating" retrovirus also cannot make more copies of itself once it has stitched itself into the host genome.

    2. T-Cell 'Nanotubes' May Explain How HIV Virus Conquers Human Immune System, PhysOrg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      String-like connections found between T-cells could be important to how HIV spreads between cells in the human immune system, according to new research published online yesterday in Nature Cell Biology. The newly-discovered strands, named 'membrane nanotubes' by scientists, could help to explain how the HIV virus infects human immune cells so quickly and effectively.

      The new laboratory-based cellular study shows that when human T-cells bump into each other and then move apart again, a long string of membrane is sometimes formed, creating a connection between the two cells.

  13. Molecular Biology: RNA Rules, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Studies of an old genetic puzzle in a little-known protozoan reveal a new frontier in the expanding world of RNAs: an RNA template guides genome-wide DNA rearrangements during sexual reproduction.

    Ciliated protozoa are unicellular organisms the analysis of which - largely because of the unusual organization of their genome - has led to fascinating fundamental discoveries, such as those of telomeres and catalytic RNAs.

    1. Endogenous Human MicroRNAs That Suppress Breast Cancer Metastasis, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: A search for general regulators of cancer metastasis has yielded a set of microRNAs for which expression is specifically lost as human breast cancer cells develop metastatic potential. Here we show that restoring the expression of these microRNAs in malignant cells suppresses lung and bone metastasis by human cancer cells in vivo. Of these microRNAs, miR-126 restoration reduces overall tumour growth and proliferation, whereas miR-335 inhibits metastatic cell invasion.

  14. Cancer: A Few to Flip the Angiogenic Switch, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The rapid formation of blood vessels, a process known as the angiogenic switch, is required for progression of dormant or micrometastatic tumors to macrometastatic invasive tumors. New blood vessels may either sprout from preexisting mature ones or form de novo by recruiting circulating endothelial progenitor cells derived from the bone marrow (1-3). Although these progenitors can incorporate into human tumors and transplanted tissue (4, 5), they do so in small numbers, raising doubt about their physiological contribution to neo-angiogenic processes.

    1. Endothelial Progenitor Cells Control the Angiogenic Switch in Mouse Lung Metastasis, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract: Angiogenesis-mediated progression of micrometastasis to lethal macrometastasis is the major cause of death in cancer patients. Here, using mouse models of pulmonary metastasis, we identify bone marrow (BM)-derived endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) as critical regulators of this angiogenic switch. We show that tumors induce expression of the transcription factor Id1 in the EPCs and that suppression of Id1 after metastatic colonization blocked EPC mobilization, caused angiogenesis inhibition, impaired pulmonary macrometastases, and increased survival of tumor-bearing animals. These findings establish the role of EPCs in metastatic progression in preclinical models and suggest that selective targeting of EPCs may merit investigation as a therapy for cancer patients with lung metastases.

    2. Cancer: Quo Vadis, Specificity?, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Finding molecules exclusively expressed by tumor cells is one of the great hopes in the fight against cancer, because therapeutically targeting such molecules, or antigens, should eradicate cancer without harming normal tissue. The extremely large repertoire of T cells bearing distinct receptors allows the immune system to recognize a multitude of antigens with great specificity and selectivity. On page 215 of this issue, Savage et al. report that T cells recognize a fragment of a ubiquitous nuclear protein, histone H4, yet somehow bypass recognizing normal cells, infiltrating prostate cancer instead.

  15. Geophysics: What Triggers Tremor?, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: An enduring mystery in geophysics is why the periodic stresses of tides do not commonly trigger earthquakes. If earthquakes simply represent reaching some threshold for the failure of rock, tidal forces should often trigger faults near failure by pushing them over the threshold. However, many studies show that this is not the case, except in special situations (1, 2). Now, on page 186, Rubinstein et al. report that a seismic activity called nonvolcanic tremor is indeed triggered by lunar-solar tides (3) and, in some cases, as reported on page 173 by Gomberg et al., by distant earthquakes (4).

    1. Brain 'Seismology' Helps Predict Epileptic Attacks, New Scientist Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:

      They both start with tiny, barely perceptible tremors that lead up to a cataclysmic climax - and now it seems that the similarities between earthquakes and epileptic seizures run deep. Seismology could even hold the key to new ways of predicting and avoiding seizures.

      A team led by neurologist Ivan Osorio of the University of Kansas in Kansas City compared the brain activity in 16,000 epileptic seizures with seismological data from 300,000 earthquakes.

  16. Physics: The Force Of Fluctuations, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Strange forces and effects dominate the world at the microscopic level. One such force, rooted in the random fluctuations of matter, has only now been accurately measured - 30 years after it was first predicted. (...)

    Above this critical temperature, the liquid-gas transition does not exist. Close to it, there are large density fluctuations, as if the system were hesitating between two very similar states. Fisher and de Gennes predicted that these fluctuations should also be affected by a confining geometry, just as in the original Casimir effect.

    1. Quantum Mechanics: Evolution Stopped In Its Tracks, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: How do you watch the evolution of something that doesn't evolve? (...)

      The velocity of a moving quantum arrow, as represented by its associated quantum wave, can be estimated at any time as its momentum divided by its mass. But although quantum mechanics gets rid of the original paradox, it supplies another unanswered question in the form of the quantum Zeno effect. Why does a quantum arrow stop when we frequently check a localized state of the arrow with non-zero momentum?


  17. Small Infinity, Big Infinity - Infinity Can Be Big Or Bigger, Countable Or Not, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    If we call Alice's numbers A1, A2, A3, etc., and Bob's B1, B2, B3, etc., we can draw a picture that would look something like this:
    So that implies that the whole interval can't be countable.

    Baker says his proof doesn't show anything Cantor didn't, but that it's a nice example of how two areas of mathematics that don't seem to have much to do with one another - in this case, game theory and set theory - are in fact tightly linked. Hard problems in mathematics are often solved by bringing together fields of math that seem only distantly related.

  18. Breakthrough Promises 40-Hour Laptop Batteries, ZDNet Australia Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Scanning Electron Microscope images of pristine silicon nanowires before (A) and after (B) electrochemical cycling (charging). Credit: Nature Nanotechnology
    Silicon anodes have the "the highest theoretical charge capacity" according to Cui's paper, but they expand when charging and shrink during use: a cycle that causes the silicon to be pulverized, degrading the performance of the battery. For 30 years, this dead end stumped researchers, who poured their battery life-extending energy into improving graphite-based anodes.

    Cui and his colleagues looked at this old problem and overcame it by constructing a new type of silicon nanowire anode.

    1. Energy Forest, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Silicon nanowires can at least double the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries.

  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. FBI Wants Instant Access To British Identity Data - Americans Seek International Database To Carry Iris, Palm And Finger Prints Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Each person's iris is as individual as their fingerprint, but with 266 identifiable features is much more detailed. Photograph: Science Photo Library
      The US-initiated programme, "Server in the Sky", would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the "war against terror" - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

      Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network.

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Dendritic Cell-Induced Memory T Cell Activation in Nonlymphoid Tissues, Linda M. Wakim, Jason Waithman, Nico van Rooijen, William R. Heath, Francis R. Carbone, 08/01/11, Science : 198-202. Immune cells, normally produced in lymphoid organs, can also be activated in the nervous system in response to a viral challenge.
      2. Mind Control: Hypnosis Offers Amnesia Clues, 08/01/12, Science News, Results of a new study using hypnosis may shed light on the process of memory retrieval and the potential for one part of the brain to block it.
      3. Seeing Again: Blind Fish Parents Have Fry That See, 08/01/12, Science News, Cross two strains of blind cavefish that have lived in the dark for a million years, and some of their offspring will be able to see.
      4. Bathtub Optics: Bending Light Also Shifts It Sideways, 08/01/12, Science News, When light bends at an interface, it also shifts depending on its polarization.
      5. Purring Birds Teach Their Chicks To Beg, 08/01/12, Science News, African birds called pied babblers teach their chicks that certain parental noises mean food is on the way.
      6. Snakes Hear In Stereo, 2008/01/10, Innovations-report
      7. The Construction Of Heart Modelling Leads Path To New Therapies, 2008/01/10, Innovations-report
      8. The Animal In The Genome: Comparative Genomics And Evolution, R. R. Copley, 2008/01/11, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2007.2235
      9. Protein In Human Hair Shows Promise For Regenerating Nerves, 2008/01/12, ScienceDaily
      10. Is Your Heart Racing For The Wrong Reason?, 2008/01/13, ScienceDaily
      11. 151,000 Violent Iraqi Deaths Since 2003 Invasion, Study Shows, 2008/01/13, ScienceDaily
      12. New Motor System Impairment Diagnosing Tool, 2008/01/14, Innovations-report
      13. Dropout, School Performance, And Working While In School, C. Montmarquette, M. Dagenais, Nov. 2007, Online 2007/10/11, Review of Economics and Statistics, DOI: 10.1162/rest.89.4.752
      14. Firms And Aggregate Dynamics, F. Franco, T. Philippon, Nov. 2007, Online 2007/10/11, Review of Economics and Statistics, DOI: 10.1162/rest.89.4.587
      15. An Investigation Of Merging And Collapsing Of Software Networks, S. Jenkins - samantha.jenkinsahv.se, S. R. Kirk - steven.kirkahv.se, Sep. 2007, Advances in Complex Systems, DOI: 10.1142/S0219525907001173

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. 7th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 07/10/28-11/02
      2. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      3. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 07/01/24-28
      4. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      5. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      6. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      7. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      8. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      9. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      10. Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
      11. An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
      12. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      13. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      14. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      15. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      16. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      17. North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity 2005 Conference, Virtual Conference Network, St. Pete's Beach, Florida, 05/06/09-11
      18. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      19. Nonlinearity, Fluctuations, and Complexity, with a celebration of the 65th birthday of Gregoire Nicolis. , Complexity Session, Universite' Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 05/03/16
      20. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      21. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      22. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      23. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      24. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      25. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      26. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      27. Edge Videos

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Evolution and Physics Concepts, Models and Applications, Bad Honnef, Germany, 08/01/21-23
      2. The 1st Conf on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08), Memphis, Tennessee, USA, 08/03/01-03
      3. The 3rd Intl Nonlinear Sciences Conference (INSC), Tokyo, Japan, 08/03/13-15
      4. 19th European Meeting On Cybernetics And Systems Research, (EMCSR 2008), Vienna, Austria, 08/03/25-28
      5. 2nd KES Intl Symp on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems : Technologies and Applications, Incheon, Korea, 08/03/26-28
      6. Nexus for Change II, Bowling Green, OH, 08/03/29-04/01
      7. 2nd Applied Neuroscience Meeting, Monterrey, Mexico, 08/04/03-06
      8. Fumee 1 - 1St Futures Meeting - Understanding Anticipatory Systems, Rovereto (Italy), 08/04/10-12
      9. 1st Intl Conf on Social Entrepreneurship & Complexity, Garden City, NY, USA, 08/04/10-12
      10. Emergence In The Physical And Biological World: A Notion In Search Of Clarification, Erice (Italy), 08/04/12-16
      11. CHAOS2008 Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference, Chania, Crete, Greece, 08/06/03-06
      12. International Conference on Chaos, Complexity & Conflict, Omaha, NE, 08/06/05-07
      13. Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Tenth Annual... Applying Systems Biology, San Francisco, CA, 08/06/09-11
      14. 9th Intl Mathematica Symposium, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 08/06/20-24
      15. The 14th Intl Conf on Auditory Display (ICAD), Paris, France, 08/06/24-27
      16. The 12th World Multi-Conf on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      17. From Animals To Animats 10 - The 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'08), Osaka, Japan, 08/07/07-12
      18. Stochastic Resonance 2008, Perugia, Italy, 08/08/17-21
      19. 1st Intl Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics and Synchronization (INDS'08), Klagenfurt, Austria, 08/07/18-19
      20. 8th Intl Conf on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, Brighton, UK, 08/07/31-08/02

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share

      1. " Wolfram Research is Now the Official Math Brain Trust for the Hit CBS Series NUMB3RS. 07/10/05
      2. A short notice from Dean LeBaron

        Dear ComDig Readers,

        Our editor, Dr. Gottfried Mayer, is affectionately esteemed by many of you -- as readers, you know he devotes himself unselfishly to widening our knowledge of complexity science. He was recently diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and given a timetable of a very few years. Knowing Gottfried, you can imagine that, in addition to the customary processes of chemotherapy, he would explore other frontier therapies, especially those arising out of interdisciplinary applications of complexity. These are expensive ... if he can find them.

        Many of you have sent your good wishes and indicated your desire to assist. With Gottfried's permission, I am posting this note with information, below, about how to send contributions to him. Please indicate the source since Gottfried will want to express his warm gratitude.

        I know that Gottfried, the good scientist that he is, will explain from time to time what he is doing and what the results are ... and we will follow his progress with great interest and hope.

        Dean LeBaron
        Publisher, Complexity Digest

        Bank Information:

        If your contribution is made by check:
        Please mail the check, payable to "Gottfried Mayer", to:
        Manufacturers & Traders Trust
        2080 Western Avenue
        20 Mall
        Guilderland, NY 12084 USA
        (on the back of the check, please write: "For Deposit Only: Account # 983 338 3814")

        If your contribution is made by wire:
        Manufacturers & Traders Trust
        2080 Western Avenue
        20 Mall

        Guilderland, NY 12084 USA
        SWIFT Code# MANTUS33
        UID: 209 791
        ABA routing # 022 00 00 46 [for US wire transfers]
        Account # 983 338 3814
        Ref. Gottfried Mayer

      3. Intl Master of Science in Methods For Management Of Complex Systems - Academic Year 2007-2008, Institute for Advanced Study, Pavia, Italy, 08/01/01
      4. News notes on Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) for July 2007 are now available on-line, 07/08/04
      5. National Humanities Center Launches Humanities/Sciences Website, 07/04, As part of its ongoing "Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human & The Humanities" project (ASC), the National Humanities Center makes public a new website for the initiative which significantly expands the potential pool of humanists and scientists engaged in the exploration and examination of topics surrounding the question of human being.

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