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| The Social Life of Bacteria: How microorganism behave as a collective
A Talk by Prof. Eshel Ben Jacob
When: Saturday, May 28th 2011, 2pm, Doors open at 1:30pm
Where: The MEx Building 33 Flatbush Avenue, 6th Floor Brooklyn NY 11217
Limited Space, please RSVP to this email if you are interested in attending |
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| Join us at Genspace for a talk about the social life of bacteria!
There are 10-times the number of bacteria in a Petri-dish as there are humans in the world. Using chemical "tweets" to communicate, millions of bacteria self-organize to form colonies that collaborate to feed and defend themselves. As our own social networks become increasingly sophisticated, we may look to the microbiological world for inspiration. Hear Professor Eshel Ben Jacob, from the school of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, discuss these biological social networks.
Here is how he describes it:
| | | Bacteria Collective Behaviors By Eshel Ben-Jacob
A wealth of beautiful patterns is formed during colonial development of various bacterial strains. In this talk, I will show illuminating pictures of colony organization and videos demonstrating the "swarming" intelligence of live bacteria, in which they solve optimization problems that are beyond what we, human beings, can solve with our most powerful computers. These observations will show that bacteria, the first and most fundamental of all organisms, lead rich social lives in large communities with tantalizing complex organization. Collectively, they gather information from the environment, learn from past experience, and make decisions. To solve newly encountered problems, the bacteria turn the colony into a super-brain. Super-brain, because the billions (and at times even trillions) of bacteria in the colony use sophisticated communication strategies to collectively solve problems and make decisions. I will also show that we can learn new principles about how our brain works from the bacteria, in particular, the importance of our emotional and social intelligence.
Eshel Ben Jacob earned his Ph.D. in physics (1982) from Tel Aviv University, where he is currently the Maguy-Glass chair in Physics of Complex Systems. Professor Ben-Jacob served as Vice president (1999-2002) and President (2002-2005) of the Israel Physical Society. He is an international leader in the theory of self-organization, adaptive complex systems and Biocomplexity. Ben-Jacob began studying bacterial colonies twenty year ago, developing new bacteria species and pioneering a new research field, the social behavior of bacteria. In his work Ben-Jacob strives to understand the essence of cognition, whose foundations, he holds, trace back to bacteria. His research in system neuroscience, dating back a decade, explores both the human brain activity and living neural networks outside the brain. In 2007, Scientific American selected Ben-Jacob's invention, the first Neuro Memory Chip, as one of the 50 most important achievements, in all fileds of science and technology, for that year. |
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| | | | | | Looking forward to seeing you! The Genspace Team
Genspace NYC, Inc.
33 Flatbush Avenue, 7th Floor Brooklyn NY 11217
| * Donation will be greatly appreciated | | |
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