What Makes a Country Good at Football? | Medium
The Economist has built a statistical model to identify what makes a country good at football. The aim is not to predict the winner in Russia, but to discover the underlying sporting and economic factors that determine a country’s footballing potential . They take the results of all international games since 1990 and see which variables are correlated with the goal difference between teams. Four lessons can be learned from the model’s outliers and improvers. First, encourage children to develop creatively. Second, stop talented teenagers from falling through the cracks. Third, make the most of football’s vast global network. And fourth, prepare properly for the tournament itself.
Immune-centric network of cytokines and cells in disease context identified by computational mining of PubMed | Nature Biotechnology
Cytokines are signaling molecules secreted and sensed by immune and other cell types, enabling dynamic intercellular communication. Although a vast amount of data on these interactions exists, this information is not compiled, integrated or easily searchable. Scientists report immuneXpresso, a text-mining engine that structures and standardizes knowledge of immune intercellular communication. They applied immuneXpresso to PubMed to identify relationships between 340 cell types and 140 cytokines across thousands of diseases.By leveraging the breadth of this network, they predicted and experimentally verified previously unappreciated cell–cytokine interactions. They also built a global immune-centric view of diseases and used it to predict cytokine-disease associations. This standardized knowledgebase (http://www.immunexpresso.org) opens up new directions for interpretation of immune data and model-driven systems immunology.
New human gene tally reignites debate | Nature
Some fifteen years after the human genome was sequenced, researchers still can’t agree on how many genes it contains. The latest count of genes in the human genome includes almost 5,000 genes that haven’t previously been spotted — among them nearly 1,200 that carry instructions for making proteins. And the overall tally of more than 21,000 protein-coding genes is a substantial jump from previous estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000. But many geneticists aren’t yet convinced that all the newly proposed genes will stand up to close scrutiny.