Knowing when to change: reprogramming (my) life

Behavior: Knowing When to Walk Away, Knowing When to Run

A new model has been proposed indicating that humans and other animals weigh the metabolic cost of pursuit in deciding how fast to move toward a given reward, providing a powerful framework for understanding behavior.

Knowing When to Stop

Knowing when to let go

uring meiosis I, some mechanism must allow homologous chromosomes to separate while keeping sister chromatids paired until meiosis II. How does a cell make this distinction? On page 219, Rogers et al. propose that in C. elegans the aurora-B kinase AIR-2 is largely responsible for ensuring that cohesion between chromosomes breaks down at the proper place and time. The authors also identified add...

Lipoprotein biogenesis in Gram-positive bacteria: knowing when to hold 'em, knowing when to fold 'em.

Gram-positive bacterial lipoproteins are a functionally diverse and important class of peripheral membrane proteins. Recent advances in molecular biology and the availability of whole genome sequence data have overturned many long-held assumptions about the export and processing of these proteins, most notably the recent discovery that not all lipoproteins are exported as unfolded substrates th...

Knowing What to Imitate and Knowing When You Succeed

If we are to build robots that can imitate the actions of a human instructor, the robotics community must address a variety of issues. In this paper, we examine two of these issues. First, how does the robot know which things it should imitate? Second, how does the robot know when its actions are an adequate imitation of the original? We further describe an on-going research effort to implement...