Tag: biology
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Universe, the Computer...
Using a molecular dimmer switch that smoothly dials up glowing lights in bacteria, researchers can make calculators in living cells that add, subtract, divide, and even do logarithms. [1] These analog computations are much more powerful than those of previous, digital-based biological devices, says study author Timothy Lu, a synthetic biologist at MIT. We make…
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Pines, humans, genome...
Deciphering the genome of the loblolly pine is a tall order, as is perhaps fitting for a tree that can grow to be 30 meters in height. Researchers sequenced the conifer’s (Pinus taeda) approximately 24 billion bases of DNA, Steven Salzberg of Johns Hopkins University reported May 10. That surpasses the previous record holder, wheat,…
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Psychiatry, biology, neurology, stupidity.
Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific "lack of validity". The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that…
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Non-competitive evolution, spaghetti, sauce...
Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase. In a paper published this week in PLOS ONE,…
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Quantum biology, superposition, Parmenides
University of Chicago researchers have created a synthetic compound that mimics the complex quantum dynamics observed in photosynthesis and may enable fundamentally new routes to creating solar-energy technologies. Engineering quantum effects into synthetic light-harvesting devices is not only possible, but also easier than anyone expected, the researchers report in the April 19 edition of Science. The…
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