Getting down to work

Work related upper limb disorders: getting down to specifics.

Getting epiphenomena to do real work

Emergence—macro-level effects from micro-level causes—is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level functionalities (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced to the fundamental forces of physics (the reductionist position)? We cut through this debate by applying a computer science lens to the way we view nature. We ...

Mechanotransduction: Getting Morphogenesis Down Pat

Embryonic morphogenesis requires the coordination of forces across multiple tissues and their associated extracellular matrices. A new study reports a mechanical feedback loop in the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo between muscle and epidermis that may provide a model for understanding how tissues coordinate morphogenetic events in the embryo.

Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in rural India. In treatment schools, teachers’ attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Absenteeism by teachers fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group,...

Embryo morphogenesis: getting down to cells and molecules.

After the molecular cloning revolution in the 1980s, the field of developmental biology became focused on the regulation of gene expression as a framework for understanding the specification of cell fate. The advent of sequenced genomes and comprehensive microarrays has removed the last obstacle to cataloguing the molecules that orchestrate development, and one challenge for the future will be ...