On October 3, 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for “discoveries of the mechanisms for autophagy.” Just a few weeks earlier, at an acceptance speech for the 2016 Paul Janssen Award, Yoshinori Ohsumi stated that although he performs research in a simple organism—baker’s yeast—he always hoped his research would have an impact upon human health.
(ur abstract för https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5240711/)
Nature 26 Oct 2021--Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature. Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.
In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist [Carl Malamud]has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles — including many paywalled papers.
The catalogue, which was released on 7 October and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California that he founded.
Malamud says that because his index doesn’t contain the full text of articles, but only sentence snippets up to five words long, releasing it does not breach publishers' copyright restrictions on the re-use of paywalled articles. However, one legal expert says that publishers might question the legality of how Malamud created the index in the first place.
Nature, July 2019. -- A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal? A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis —but is it legal?
Over the past year, Malamud has — without asking publishers — teamed up with Indian researchers to build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day. The cache, which is still being created, will be kept on a 576-terabyte storage facility at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. “This is not every journal article ever written, but it’s a lot,” Malamud says. It’s comparable to the size of the core collection in the Web of Science database, for instance. Malamud and his JNU collaborator, bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, call their facility the JNU data depot.
There are a lot of politicians and scientists who do not feel the obligation to listen to sceptics like you. How come there is only one kind of truth?
Freeman Dyson (2016): Yes, this is of course a question I cannot answer. I have a theory about that. Which has to do with the evolution of humans. We evolved in small tribes. A hang-together-society in which we lived for a million years or so. As small tribes hunting in the forest, competing with each other. That’s how humans evolved. And under those conditions the important thing was loyalty to the tribe. It was absolutely the most important thing to have people totally loyal to the tribe. Holding the tribe together. And whether their beliefs where right or wrong was not so important. As long as they believed the same things they would survive. And I think that is very much driving us still. To be with the herd, to be thinking the same thoughts as other people is build into our nature. So it’s still more important to belong to the tribe than it is to speak the truth. And so I think that explains it a bit. And scientists are not different from other people, we have our tribes also. This believe in global warming, it is a tribal loyalty which is very strong. It’s always difficult for the heretic to find people to believe what he is saying. But still heretics are also important and luckily they are not burned at the stake anymore.
An increasing part of modern science is based not on reality but on simplified models of reality, which are all the better the closer they are to reality. A model is not a scientific proof. It does not prove anything; it is something to be proved. Syukuro Manabe was awarded the Nobel Prize for designing…
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021 If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As is now obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it.
"To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces."