Weekly Links May 30th, 2016

“MUST READ”

• Meet George Church, the brash biologist out to upend evolution

George Church has a wild idea to upend evolution. Here’s your guide Harvard biologist George Church burst into the headlines (yet again) last week when he helped organize a closed-door meeting of scores of top scientists to discuss accelerating effo…

tags: Pocket weeklylinks

DISRUPTION, REVOLUTION

• Genetically Engineered Crops Are Safe, Analysis Finds - The New York Times

tags: weeklylinks

• The report also says that new techniques, like a way to make small genetic changes in plants using genome-editing, are blurring the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding, making the existing regulatory system untenable. It calls for a new system that pays more attention to the attributes of the crop, as opposed to the way in which it was created.

TOOLS/TECHNIQUES

• Coming of age: ten years of next-generation sequencing technologies : Nature Reviews Genetics : Nature Publishing Group

Nature Reviews Genetics Volume: 17, Pages: 333–351 Year published: (2016) DOI: doi:10.1038/nrg.2016.

tags: Pocket weeklylinks

HEALTH/MEDECINE

• affordance.info: Un rein vaut mieux que deux IA : #Google #Deepmind et la médecine prédictive.

tags: weeklylinks google médecine

• L'histoire des relations (et des ambitions) de Google avec la médecine et la génomique est déjà ancienne. Je vous l'ai racontée au cours de différents billets.
• The Plan to Avert Our Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse - The Atlantic

The Plan to Avert Our Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse A new report estimates that by 2050, drug-resistant infections will kill one person every three seconds, unless the world’s governments take drastic steps now. Under instructions from U.K.

tags: Pocket weeklylinks

COMPANIES

• Bayer offers Big Buy out for Monsanto. Shareholders are not pleased...

Bayer offers Big Buy out for the infamous Monsanto. Shareholders are not pleased… Yes, everyone is talking about how Germany’s Pharma giant Bayer has made a $62 billion offer for the infamous chemicals conglomerate Monsanto. And not many like it.

tags: Pocket weeklylinks 

·         Thermo Fisher Scientific to Buy FEI for $4.2 Billion - WSJ

tags: weeklylinks

o    Lab-equipment company Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.  TMO      0.62  %         on Friday said it reached a deal to acquire microscope-technology maker FEI Co. for $4.2 billion in cash.

The purchase price, at $107.50 a share, represents a 14% premium to FEI’s closing price on Thursday. The maker of high-end electron microscopes will join Thermo Fisher’s analytical instruments segment.

 

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

• Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design - The New York Times

tags: weeklylinks

• The same design qualities that make an app enthralling, he said, may also make it difficult for people to put down. And the more popular such services become, the more appeal they hold for users — a phenomenon known as the network effect.
• Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs | WIRED

Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box. You could analyze a subject’s behavior—ring bell, dog salivates—but thou…

tags: Pocket weeklylinks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.