Tag: science

RNA de novo prediction

Blind, accurate structure prediction for small RNAs, relying solely on the minimization of free energy, seems feasible. Once this challenge is met, modeling efforts become tantalizing possibilities for large ribozymes and protein/RNA complexes.

Rotamer Rally

Androgen receptor is out of control, causing a cancerous tumor! You have to design another protein to block it and stop the cancer. Your protein needs to fit tightly up against androgen receptor. Find the side chain that plugs the hole!

David Baker journal

with your help, we now have a number of brand new designed enzymes that speed up the chemical reactions they were designed to catalyze by more than 50000 fold!

Universal Heritage Poster

Summarizing 13.7B years in a series of timelines, it chronicles the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Each consecutive timeline focuses on a shorter span of time, so you can directly compare the scale of human history to the

Searching for God in the Brain

Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith

now you can get the goods without having to waste time in an organization

Galactic Gradients

We suggest that the outer regions of the Galaxy are most likely locations for advanced SETI targets, and that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase.

Water bridge

Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable.

Tardigrades in Space

The world’s toughest animal has been sent into space. Tardigrades can survive incredibly harsh conditions, including freezing to near absolute 0, extreme vacuum and radiation. Exposed to open space on the Russian FOTON M3 satellite, tardigrades are the first animals tested and perhaps the best candidate on earth for surviving space travel.

I wonder how much of their hardiness is a function of their size, and how much of superior genes
2021-12-23: And now they’ve demonstrated another feat:

To perform their entanglement experiment, Dumke and co cooled their tardigrade to below 10 millikelvin, almost to absolute 0, while reducing the pressure to a millionth of that in the atmosphere. In these conditions, no chemical reaction can occur so the tardigrade’s metabolism must have entirely halted stopped and the processes of life halted. “This is to-date the most extreme exposure to low temperatures and pressures that a tardigrade has been recorded to survive, clearly demonstrating that the state of cryptobiosis ultimately involves a suspension of all metabolic processes given that all chemical reactions would be prohibited with all its constituent molecules cooled to their ground states”

KML Astronomy

In an ideal world all such observational astronomical data would exist in a machine-readable markup format, and I’m willing to venture it soon will. Just as it took the geospatial web 1 year or 2 to reorient itself towards making its data available in a format compatible with KML, the astronomical web will take a while to provide its data in a similar format.

lets hope this speeds up astronomical discoveries

Secret Knowledge

Hockney is doing an enormous disservice to many of the artists of the past, to living artists who draw without computers, projecting or tracing, and to future artists who will believe learning to draw is unnecessary since mechanical means will be good enough.

if you ever need to troll an artist, claim that the old masters traced, not painted.