Ants, Robots, Episode #6 of KKD and Data Mining

[April 8-12, 2013] The editors’ note about your science week.

This week, MyScienceNews covered a great variety of scientific news in English. Enjoy your weekend reading – maybe for a second time – all these articles, from the latest news in the world of Science 2.0 to miniature robots mimicking the behavior of ants.

This week, MyScienceNews covered a great variety of scientific news in English. Enjoy your weekend reading – maybe for a second time – all these articles, from the latest news in the world of Science 2.0 to miniature robots mimicking the behavior of ants.

 

Like every week, you can watch a new episode of our web series Knock Knock Doc. In episode 6, Erwan Poivet, a PhD student in biology explains to Arthur, our young journalism intern, his research on the caterpillar of a certain moth. It’s a good opportunity to enjoy the view of a gigantic butterfly conservatory in France. It really makes you want to go and take a look, doesn’t it?

Knock Knock Doc – Episode 06 # Season 1 : Caterpillar Control

 

To continue on the theme of insects, read about some very unusual ants: biomimetic robots developed by biologists and computer scientists. Mathematical modeling reaches its limits when it comes to studying the collective behaviors of complex societies, such as ant colonies. These biomimetic robots highlight some behaviors and patterns that had remained unknown until now.

Biomimetic robots : A tool to understand collective behavior

 

 

As this article shows, understanding complex mechanisms requires new methods in science. Managing social networks and the associated data, for example, is a major issue. To find out more about it, read our article:

The stakes of data mining : The age of cloud computing and social networks

 

The Linking Open Data dataset cloud by Regis Gaidot/Flickr

 

To finish this week and give you food for thought for the weekend, we initiated a debate on MyScienceNews. You may have followed the latest news in the Science 2.0 and Open Science communities? Mendeley, a tool for bibliography management, has just been taken over by Elsevier, a big, traditional scientific publisher. This agreement has been a shock for a lot of researchers. And you, what do you think?

Feel free to comment our article.

Elsevier takes over Mendeley: And you, what do you think? As the takeover raises questions, the startup seems rather satisfied with its lot.

 

 

We hope all this news will provide you with reading pleasure and wish you all a very good weekend!

 

The MyScienceWork Team

 

Source photo : FLickr/Regis Gaidot

 

Thanks to Timothée Froelich for the translation.