National Human Genome Research Institute (videos of April 2017)

source: National Human Genome Research Institute
 59:12 Pharmacogenetics - Victoria Pratt April 13, 2017 - Webinars for Health Insurers and Payers: Understanding Genetic Testing
More: https://www.genome.gov/27563343/
 1:01:50 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Charles Rotimi For more than two decades, Charles Rotimi, Ph.D., chief of the Metabolic, Cardiovascular and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute
(NHGRI), has studi...
 53:22 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Current and Former NHGRI Directors - Part II In 2014 and 2015, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) filmed a panel discussion with former directors James Watson, Ph.D. and Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and current director Eri...
 1:32:57 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Current and Former NHGRI Directors - Part I In 2014 and 2015, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) filmed a panel discussion with former directors James Watson, Ph.D. and Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and current director Eri...
 1:20:49 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with David Bentley David Bentley, Ph.D., is chief scientist at Illumina Inc., where he develops new DNA sequencing technology for fast, accurate sequencing of complex genomes. This oral history follows Dr. Bentley’s ...
 1:55:35 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Maynard Olson Maynard Olson, Ph.D., professor of Genome Sciences and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, is a major figure in genomics research, and his research involving large-scale genome ana...
 1:33:21 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Ewan Birney Ewan Birney, Ph.D., co-director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute, played a vital role in annotating the genome of human, mouse, chicken and several o...
 46:55 NHGRI's Oral History Collection: Interview with Howard McLeod Howard McLeod, Pharm.D., is the founding medical director of the Moffitt Cancer Center’s DeBartolo Family Personalized Medicine Institute and a senior member in its Department of Cancer Epidemiolog...

Wiring up the brain: How axons navigate (Christine Holt)

source: The Royal Society    2017年4月3日
Ferrier Prize Lecture 2017 given by Professor Christine Holt FMedSci FRS
The brain is made up of billions of nerve cells (neurons) that are wired together by axons and dendrites. The precision of this wiring allows us to accurately sense, interpret and interact with the outside world, which is crucial for survival. Many neurons are positioned far away from the targets so they face the formidable task of sending out an axon that must navigate correctly over a long distance to find its targets. This key step in wiring the brain, called axon guidance, occurs early in embryonic development mostly before birth in humans.
In this lecture, Professor Holt will describe work on how the eye makes its long-distance connections with the brain. She will discuss general mechanisms of guidance and the discovery that RNA-based mechanisms inside axons help to establish and maintain neural circuitry.
The lecture was recorded on March 2 2017 at the Royal Society. For more events like this, see our schedule - http://ow.ly/KhTi306gTN1

Risk and Uncertainty in Exploration for Oil and Gas January 2017

source: GeologicalSociety     2017年3月29日
The fundamental requirements for the entrapment of oil and gas are the presence of a mature source rock, migration of those hydrocarbons from there into a trap, which contains an effective reservoir rock and an appropriate seal. There may be a difference of many millions of years in age of the source, reservoir and seal horizons and the timing of hydrocarbon migration and juxtaposition of these rocks to form a trap is critical.
Once formed, many traps may be destroyed or leak, due to later tectonics. When prospects are worked up and assessed, the overall “Chance of Success” is calculated on the basis of the probability of the presence and effectiveness of the source, reservoir and trap. This describes the overall ‘risk’ of finding hydrocarbons within the range estimated and this may vary from 10% in frontier basins to 30—50% in proven basins.
There is also ‘uncertainty’, which describes the range of outcomes, even when, say the reservoir rock is found to be present. How thick is it? How porous and permeable? Is the original depositional facies as predicted? How connected is it across the prospect?
There is also uncertainty even when hydrocarbons are found, as only a certain amount of appraisal wells can be afforded to establish the range of reserves, before making a multi-billion-dollar decision to develop the field.
Above surface uncertainty also exists. The oil and gas business is a capital intensive, long term business. An oil or gas field may have a life of 5 to 50 years, depending on size and economics. There will be uncertainty of future oil price, government tax rates and in some cases, the future political stability of the host country.
Environmental sensitivity, community relationships and ‘licence to operate’ are all key aspects which must also be assessed. And of course, the impact of fossil fuels on global warming and climate change, is now also a firm part of the context for any decisions, as the world needs to move to a lower carbon environment.

Speaker: Malcolm Brown, President of the Geological Society
After graduating from Kingston Polytechnic (1976), with a BSc in Geology, Malcolm worked in Libya and Saudi Arabia before completing an MSc in Petroleum Geology at Imperial College (1982). He worked at British Gas / BG Group for over 30 years as it evolved from state owned utility to successful international business and was Executive Vice President, Exploration.
Malcolm became a Fellow in 1982, served on Council between 2009 and 2012 and became a Chartered Geologist in 2013. He took over as President of the Society in 2016.

Vernon Bogdanor--The Monarchy (Gresham College)

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source: GreshamCollege   2016年12月30日
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
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Queen Victoria - Professor Vernon Bogdanor 49:12
Queen Victoria was the first constitutional monarch.
During her reign the power of the monarchy declined but its influence grew. When Victoria came to the throne, the monarchy was probably less popular than at any time since the seventeenth century. By the end of her reign, it had been raised to a level of prestige and affection which it has never lost. The Crown had become the symbol not only of British nationhood but also of Empire. How did this come about?
King Edward VII 55:32
King George V  1:01:02
King Edward VIII  58:08
King George VI  49:19
Queen Elizabeth II 52:39

Bold Ideas in Medicine by Christopher Whitty (Gresham College)

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source: GreshamCollege    2016年12月8日
The treatment for people with many cancers has been transformed in the last two decades, and further major improvements are expected to occur over the next twenty years. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Improved surgery and radiotherapy have been joined by less toxic chemotherapy targeting specific genetic abnormalities in cancer cells. Better genetic understanding of cancer and harnessing the immune system to fight disease are among the approaches revolutionising a group of diseases once seen as incurable.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.
Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
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The Treatment of Cancer - Professor Christopher Whitty 55:52
The Prevention of Cancer 52:36
The Eradication of Infectious Diseases 49:47

Structure vs. Randomness (Simons Institute)

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source: Simons Institute     2017年4月10日
This workshop will focus on a phenomenon observed in harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, analytic number theory, graph theory, complexity theory, additive combinatorics and cryptography, according to which arbitrary objects can be well approximated by a combination of a small number of pseudorandom objects. In the study of higher-order Fourier analysis, this corresponds to approximating every function by a combination of structured functions plus a function of small Gowers norm; in graph theory it corresponds to Szemeredi’s regularity lemma; in cryptography it corresponds to approximating distributions dominated by a pseudorandom distribution by distributions of high min-entropy; and so on.
The workshop will bring together researchers working on such decomposition results in different areas and with different motivations, who often use technically similar methods.
For more information, please visit https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/pseudorandomness2017-3
These presentations were supported in part by an award from the Simons Foundation.

Algorithmic Dense Model Theorems and Weak Regularity 34:13 Russell Impagliazzo, UC San Diego https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rus...
Sum of Squares Lower Bounds for Refuting Any CSP 30:31
Large Deviations for Arithmetic Progressions 58:51
Trading Information Complexity for Error 29:05
Sparse Dense Dichotomy and Liquid Graphs 25:39
The Entropy Decrement Method and the Erdos Discrepancy Problem 57:37
Vinogradov's Three Primes Theorem with Primes from Special Sets 1:01:44
Additive Structure of Sets of Fourier Coefficients 1:02:35
On Structural Properties of Low Threshold Rank Graphs 35:01
Hidden Irregularity Versus Hidden Structure: The Emergence of the Johnson Graphs 1:06:48
Hidden Irregularity Versus Hidden Structure: The Emergence of the Johnson Graphs 44:26
Random High-Dimensional Combinatorial Objects 1:04:52
Positional Games and Randomness 1:02:09
Labeling the Complete Bipartite Graph with No Zero Cycles 58:07
Unavoidable Patterns in Words 57:05
True Complexity of Multilinear Systems 1:00:50

Simons Institute Open Lectures, Spring 2017

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source: Simons Institute      2017年2月15日
The Simons Institute Open Lectures are aimed at a broad scientific audience and specialist seminars associated with particular programs.
For more information, please visit https://simons.berkeley.edu/events/openlectures.
These presentations were supported in part by an award from the Simons Foundation.

Does Randomness Solve Problems? 59:04 Russell Impagliazzo, UC San Diego
The Contextual Bandits Problem 54:29
In Pursuit of Structure: Why a Little Randomness (Almost) Always Helps 51:05
Does Computational Complexity Restrict Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning? 52:08