Francisco Varela was a Biologist, Philosopher and Neuroscientist who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of Autopoiesis to Biology.

A 20-year lesson

THE ECONOMIST | Education

Charter schools are controversial, for three reasons. They represent an “experiment” or “privatisation”. They largely bypass the unions. And their results are mixed.

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Aimee Mullins: The opportunity of adversity

TED Talk

The thesaurus might equate “disabled” with synonyms like “useless” and “mutilated,” but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she shows how adversity — in her case, being born without shinbones — actually opens the door for human potential.

A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and advocate for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

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John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing

NEW YORK TIMES | By MARGALIT FOX

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

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Women Outpace Men in Earning PhDs

WASHINGTON POST | By DANIEL DE VISE

For the first time, more women than men in the United States received doctoral degrees [in 2009], the culmination of decades of change in the status of women at colleges nationwide, according to a [2010] study undertaken by the Council of Graduate Schools.

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The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of

NEW YORK TIMES | By NATALIE ANGIER

Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether.

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex.  She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity

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