Word: complexers
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...compound, let's say, a hypertension medication, works in a whole living system. You can't just determine how it works on blood pressure or the heart. You need to know how it would affect all the organs. That really is the whole purpose of using a complex biological system known as an animal...
...everybody's hope [that one day we could replace animal trials entirely with computer modeling]. But I don't think it'll happen during my lifetime. People in the research community will be the first to tell you they still don't know enough about how the complex living organism works in order to duplicate it. Animals are not perfect. They're definitely not a perfect mimic of a human, but they're [still] as close as we're going to get without using a human...
...Winston, who died Sunday at 62, after a seven-year bout with multiple myeloma, probably gave more kids more sleepless nights than anyone in Hollywood. Yet he wasn't out simply to scare the audience; he wanted to create complex, often sympathetic figures- to enlighten us about the dark side. "I don't do special effects," he once said. "I do characters." His Edward Scissorhands character, elaborated on from director Tim Burton's sketches, puts the poignancy right in that white, sweet, baleful, soulful face. The Penguin, played by Danny De Vito in Burton's Batman Returns, is an ugly...
...again, but science increasingly is learning something from them. A generation ago, the paradigm-shifting understanding of chaos theory revealed the power of disorder in meteorology, marketing, plate tectonics and more. Similarly, investigators across the social and scientific spectrums are today studying how systems that seem simple or complex may be just the opposite--and how that fact can expand our understanding of our world. "Ask me why I forgot my keys today, and the answer may be that something was on my mind," says neuroscientist Chris Wood of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico, a multidisciplinary think...
...ability to balance on the simplicity-complexity fulcrum is producing results elsewhere too--in increasingly complex software that yields increasingly intuitive user interfaces (think the iPhone); in algorithms that show how the movements of schooling fish mirror the behavior of investors, making stock-market predictions more reliable. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize--winning physicist and a co-founder of SFI, likes to cite the case of physicist Karl Jansky, who founded the science of radio astronomy in 1931 when he was studying the hiss of electromagnetic static that bathes the Earth--part of the same hiss you hear...