Stephen Bolen

The Battelle study gathered longitudinal data, beginning in 1988, about federal funding for the Human Genome Project and factored in funds for related projects. The authors then looked at how that money rippled through the economy, producing growth in industry and academia. The analysis concluded that initial investments returned $244 billion in personal income to employees and created 3.8 million job-years of employment. “There will be benefits for years and decades to come,” says Grueber.

Unreal.

Japan’s northern half sits on the North American tectonic plate. The Pacific plate, which is mostly undersea, normally slides under this plate, slowly nudging the country west. But in the earthquake, the fault line between the two plates ruptured, and the North American plate slid up and out along the Pacific plate.

The rising edge of plate caused the sea floor off Japan’s eastern coast to bulge up — one measuring station run by Tohoku University reported an underwater rise of 16 feet (5 meters) — creating the tsunami that devastated the coast. The portion of the plate under Japan was pulled lower as it slid toward the ocean, which caused a corresponding plunge in elevation under the country.

Some areas in Ishinomaki moved southeast 17 feet (5.3 meters) and sank 4 feet (1.2 meters) lower.

I must have the most fragmented iPhoto library on the planet. I’ve been using iPhoto to manage all of my digital photographs since iPhoto debuted in 2002. Over time, I’ve moved disk formats from HFS to HFS+ and migrated Mac Operating Systems on the release cycles from Mac OS 9.x to Mac OS 10.6.x.

To think, I thought moving my 121.5GB of music was hard – at least I had easier access to named songs organized in artist/album folders. With iPhoto, I have to export each photoset manually from the old MacBook Pro and import everything manually to the new MacBook Pro. This, honestly, is the least Apple-like experience I’ve ever had with an Apple product.

At least I have everything backed up on Flickr!

Just what I needed: another reason to feel good about drinking scotch.

Pretty cool.

Once the team was comfortable with the virtual evolution environment it had set up, it added a new twist: It allowed the robots to share food disks with each other. If Hamilton’s hypothesis was correct, “successful” virtual robots were likely to be those that were closely related and shared food with each other; that would help to ensure that at least one of them — and some of the genes of both—would make it to the next round. (Two robots with a modest amount of food disks would both be more likely to be cut from the simulation, but if one robot gave all of its food to a second robot, that second robot would likely make the next round.) And indeed, altruism quickly evolved in the simulation, with greater food-sharing in groups where robots were more related, the researchers report online today in PLoS Biology. The more closely related the robots, the quicker they cooperated. “It shows how general the [theory] is, whether you are an insect, a human or a robot,” says Floreano.

And that’s why I OH HEY A FOOTBALL!

The world’s largest genome-mapping facility is in an unlikely corner of China. Hidden away in a gritty neighborhood in Shenzhen’s Yantian district, surrounded by truck-repair shops and scrap yards prowled by chickens, Beijing’s most ambitious biomedical project is housed in a former shoe factory.

A shoe factory. Crazy!