DNA Computers–Think Origami, or Brain Folds

Scientists have struggled for over thirty years to market a DNA computer to the masses. It can play tic-tac-toe and solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (best way for a national sales guy to visit twenty-thirty cities–quite relevant to everyday people). Now the experts are considering using DNA computer apps to fight disease. But, for us middle Americans, we are far from benefiting from the power, affordability and tiny size of DNA computers.

Here’s a clever idea I stumbled across on MIT’s blog. We all know that the reason the brain can do so much is it relies on the folds that cover its surface. Technically, they’re not ‘folds’; they’re Gyri or Gyrus (singular) and the ‘valleys’ between the Gyri are called Sulci or Sulcus. Anyway, Mother Nature added these to give that umph to our brains in power, storage capacity and speed that no computer comes close to matching. Why not add them to DNA computers? Here’s a discussion:

DNA Origami for Faster, Smaller Computer Chips

Using DNA structures, researchers may be able to construct tinier, cheaper chips

Artificial, self-assembling DNA structures may help make smaller and cheaper microchips, according to research presented in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Tinier microchips would allow faster computers and other electronics.

Researchers from IBM and the California Institute of Technology used a technique known as DNA origami, where a long strand of DNA is folded into a shape with many shorter strands dubbed staples, creating a three-dimensional shape. In the paper, the researchers demonstrated using DNA origami-shapes as a scaffold for carbon nanotubes–a trick that could eventually be used to create nanoscale microchips.

The DNA structures are tiny enough to have features measuring six nanometers–the current industry standard for microchips is 45 nanometers. The process could replace the expensive tools manufacturers currently use to make tiny chips, although IBM suggests that it could take up to 10 years to test and refine the process for manufacturing.

Why Are People Right-handed?

Twining ivy

Plants are left or right-handed. Look at them. They grow toward one direction, not

necessarily due to the sun. You’re probably most familiar with plants that have tendrils, or twine their way up a post  or fence. If you look more closely, you’ll notice that they form consistent right- or left-handed helices as they climb.

Non-human primates are balanced as far as handedness goes–some left, some right–as were Australopithecines. But when our genus Homo arrived, we became more likely right-handed.

Why? Take a guess before you read the article below. Defense? Hunting? Some requirement of balance with our upright position? Maybe a relationship between the right hand and left brain?

Read on.

The Origins of Handedness – Origins

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Metamaterials and an invisibility cloak

Sounds like a Klingon cloaking device if you’re a Star Trek buff. What used to be the staple of science fiction is now almost reality thanks to ‘metamaterials’ and their ability to guide  electromagnetic waves around an object and emerge on the other side as if they had passed through nothing but air. the result: They eliminate all reflection and shadows, thus rendering an object invisible. Early this year, Duke University made one that measures 20 inches by four inches and is less than an inch thick. Its 10,000 pieces are made of the same fiberglass material used in circuit boards. It uses algorithms to determine the shape and placement of each piece in the cloak.

I’ve been researching metamaterials for a book I’m writing. I like including weird science in my plots. I’d show you a picture of something shrouded in an invisibility cloak, but, well, if you’re a James Bond fan, remember his invisible car? Like that.

Here’s an amazing article from the BBC, gives you a sense of what it would be. This British art student painted her car to match the surroundings, simulating invisibility. Kinda. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s amazing.

Numbers in Nature–the Movie

I’m not the only one crazy about numbers. These people made whole movies about them. This first is inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, created by Cristóbal Vila.:

This second one is about the Fibonacci Sequence (see this on codes and Fibonacci Number and this visual on Fibonacci Number):

This third one addresses the Golden Ratio (i.e., the Fibonacci sequence):

Enjoy!

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog,Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-monthly contributor to Today’s Author. In her free time, she is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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The History of the World in a 2-minute Video

Don’t believe it’s possible? Check this out…

Bill Bryson would be jealous.

Lucy: A Biography–Part XVIII

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis.

Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today.

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine.

Singularities Anyone?

Google Science Fair–Win a College Scholarship

Enter Google's second annual science fair by April 1, 2012 and win a $50k college scholarship--just for doing what you do best

Lucy: A Biography–Part I

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight over the limited resources of Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself  when her family is trampled by an enraged herd of mammoth and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, two deadly predators track them: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient spirit who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though a chemistry experiment. The geography, biosphere and climate are carefully researched to represent what Lucy would have faced in a world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion unimaginable today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story. Here’s Part 1 of the Preface:

PREFACE

“Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is

fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”

Henry Gee, Nature 2001

Like a favonian breeze, life arrived on Planet Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. Our story begins much later, a brief two million years before present, during the waning days of the Pliocene Epoch, itself part of the 65-million-year-long Cenozoic Era. The primordial continent of Gondwana has splintered into chunks and warm-blooded, furry mammals have replaced the dinosaurs. The climate is cooling and the growing glaciers have locked billions of gallons of Earth’s water into icy prisons. South America has moved to its present position contiguous to North America and the land bridge connecting Asia with Alaska still exists.

If you telescope in, you’ll see we are in Africa.

32 Science Websites for Fifth Graders

This list covers all sorts of science from nature to geology. Like with the math websites, for my

students, occasionally I put a list on the internet start page and let students go there during sponge time (click the link and see what’s up this month, so close to the end of the school year):

1. Breathing earth–the environment
2. Dynamic Earth–interactive
3. Earth Science Digital Library
4. Electric Circuits Game
5. Forest Life
6. Forests
7. Geologic history
8. Geologic movies–great and fun
9. Human Body Games
10. Moon around
11. Moon—We Choose the Moon
12. Nature—explore it
13. Ocean Currents–video
14. Ocean Videos
15. Ocean Waves–video
16. Ology Sites
17. Periodic Table of Videos
18. Planet in Action via Google Earth
19. Satellite Fly-bys–by zip code
20. Science games
21. Science Games II
22. Science Games—Bitesize
23. Science Stuff
24. Smithsonian Museum
25. Solar System Video
26. Solar System in 3D
27. Stardate Online
28. Virtual tour (with pictures) of a zoo
29. Virtual tours
30. Volcano Adventure
31. Water Cycle
32. Wonderville

Pig Survived Being Buried for Weeks

The Scientist reports that scientists have cloned a castrated male hog that survived for more than a month buried in the rubble after a massive 2008 earthquake in China.

Read more…

Book Review: Runaway Brain

The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness

by Christopher Wills

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

In my lifelong effort to understand what makes us human, I long ago arrived at the lynchpin to that discussion: our brain. Even though bipedalism preceded big brains, and we couldn’t be who we are without that upright stance, I believe we would be little more than vertical apes without being followed quickly by an explosion in our brain size. And, I’m not talking about volume–quantity–as much as quality. Neanderthals taught us brain growth must be in the correct part of the brain. Bigger, stronger animals require bigger stronger brains, but that doesn’t mean they are more efficient or effective. Neanderthals had a brain bigger than modern man, but it was used to drive their life style, not their evolution.

It is this topic that Christopher Wills investigates in his wonderful book, The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness (Harper Collins 1993). His approach is not so much a simple discussion of our brain’s changes over time as a focus on how those changes turned the genus Homo into the most unique animal on the planet. His writing is fun, easy-to-understand and almost like a thriller as we are forced to turn pages long after we might have put the book down. Why? We must see what happens next. He discusses not only evolution, but brain growth in modern man–how does the brain mature throughout our own lifetime. I learned most of this in my child psychology classes, but reading it through his eyes was so much more fun than the way my professors described it.

The real meat of the book is his discussion of changes in the brain that enabled our evolution to Thinking Man. So much of what we are wouldn’t be possible without drastic changes in the brain’s structure. Mutations, certainly, but we’re thankful for them. Our ability to speak as we do is one. Our interest in art and music–symbolic thinking, where we don’t just say things in a black-and-white sort of way, but use mental pictures. As recently as the early 1900’s, this sort of symbolic thinking allowed primitive tribes to travel their habitat without ever getting lost–even to places they had never before been.

How did we come up with counting? How did we decide to adorn ourselves with paint and jewelry? These would not have occurred without changes in our brain that made these seem normal. Why does man problem-solve? Most other species follow instinct. If there isn’t a solution that’s hard-wired into their genes or they can learn from a parent, it’s out of their reach. Not mankind.

These are all part of the Runaway Brain. Jump in and don’t let go. If you borrow the book from the library, you’ll end up purchasing it because you’ll want to refer to it over and over.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, an ISTE article reviewer, an IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything and Technology in Education. Currently, she’s working on a techno-thriller that should be ready this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Some Scientist Stole My Storyline

My day job is teaching tech at a K-8 school. My night job is writing–everything. I write, blogs, book reviews, Amazon Vine Voice reviews, columns for ezines…

And books. My first book was on the paleo-life of Homo habilis. It shared my educated guess on what life was like for man when Nature ruled and we just hung on for dear life. I called it Evolution: A Biography. I started the sequel (Born in a Treacherous Time) about the paleo-life of Homo habilis‘ successor, Homo erectus. By this time in man’s history, we’d acquired tools, rudimentary problem-solving and a small amount of control over our lives. I read a library of books to learn what I needed to know to create these worlds, many of them reviewed for you here.

I still love paleo-history, but a publisher I was trying to convince to publish my paleo-histories, suggested I bring my stories into modern time to widen their appeal. OK. I didn’t mind trying that. I decided to create stories where the sizzle of science and the brilliance of our big brains created the plot’s drama, crises, climaxes and resolutions. I wrote my first thriller about a brilliant scientist, a former Navy SEAL, a quirky almost-human AI named Otto (you see the palindrome?) and how they saved the world. It involved some intriguing science about magnetic signatures and artificial intelligence. I called it To Hunt a Sub.

Click the Square; Create Music

Click the image, then click the square to create music

Insurance

Click The Squares!

Credit: (Source: mandaflewaway)

Metamaterials and an invisibility cloak

Sounds like a Klingon cloaking device if you’re a Star Trek buff. What used to be the staple of science fiction is now almost reality thanks to ‘metamaterials’ and their ability to guide  electromagnetic waves around an object and emerge on the other side as if they had passed through nothing but air. the result: They eliminate all reflection and shadows, thus rendering an object invisible. Early this year, Duke University made one that measures 20 inches by four inches and is less than an inch thick. Its 10,000 pieces are made of the same fiberglass material used in circuit boards. It uses algorithms to determine the shape and placement of each piece in the cloak.

I’ve been researching metamaterials for a book I’m writing. I like including weird science in my plots. I’d show you a picture of something shrouded in an invisibility cloak, but, well, if you’re a James Bond fan, remember his invisible car? Like that.

Here’s an amazing article from the BBC, gives you a sense of what it would be. This British art student painted her car to match the surroundings, simulating invisibility. Kinda. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s amazing.

Numbers in Nature–the Movie

I’m not the only one crazy about numbers. These people made whole movies about them. This first is inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, created by Cristóbal Vila.:

This second one is about the Fibonacci Sequence (see this on codes and Fibonacci Number and this visual on Fibonacci Number):

This third one addresses the Golden Ratio (i.e., the Fibonacci sequence):

Enjoy!

 

Did You Know: Kindle Ebooks Outsell Physical Books

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO, reported there are 6 Kindles sold for every 10 physical books. There are lots of reasons:

• they are more affordable
• they are more portable. You can always have a book with you.
• they are more varied. Lots of new and exciting authors are publishing books they wouldn’t have been able to using the traditional model.
• more people are inspired to read by this 21st century approach to what’s been around since the 15th century’s Gutenberg Press

These are all anecdotal reasons. If you use a Kindle or Nook or any of the other ereaders, why did you join the revolution?

Statistics Sparkle with Hans Rosling

If you haven’t discovered Hans Rosling’s Wonderful World of Statistics, watch this. He is to the dry staid world of numbers what Walt Disney is to theme parks. I discovered him through Timethief over at One Cool Site. What a find. It’s this kind of sharing that is the true power of the blogosphere. You can find any information you want, out there for free, if you spend a bit of time looking.

 

What’s a Space Plane?

In my current novel, Search and Destroy, the F-15 Eagle makes a cameo appearance, designed to whet the reader’s appetite for my next novel where America’s first and last defensive weapon against space-based weapons. With only one successful flight to its credit (as well as the fictional account of Major Amelia Nakamura when she shot the Kosmos 1801 down in Clancy’s Red Storm Rising), the only remaining iterations of America’s foray into defending space sit available, but not used.

The F-15 was designed to launch a defensive attack on a weapon that threatened the US from space. To do that, it would fly at Mach 1.22 at a 65 degree-angle, carrying ASM-135 ASAT missile. The missile is only 18 feet in length and 2700 lbs, small enough to be carried on the centerline pylon of the F-15. The pilot climbs at a sixty-five degree angle at Mach 1.22, and launches the weapon below the path of its target which it destroys by smashing into it.  During its first and only test, Major General Wilbert D. “Doug” Pearson flew the Celestial Eagle 76-0084, destroyed the Solwind P78-1 satellite orbiting over 375 feet above the planet.

IBM Computer Competes with Jeopardy Winner

Fascinating. I wish computers could solve world hunger.

IBM computer taking on ‘Jeopardy!’ champs for $1M

By Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — It’s the size of 10 refrigerators, and it swallows encyclopedias whole, but an IBM computer was lacking one thing it needed to battle the greatest champions from the “Jeopardy!” quiz show.

It couldn’t hit a buzzer.

But that’s been fixed, and on Thursday the hardware and software system named Watson was to play a practice round against Ken Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive “Jeopardy!” games in 2004-05, and Brad Rutter, who won a record of nearly $3.3 million in prize money.

“‘Jeopardy!’ felt that in order for the game to be as fair as possible, just as a human has to physically hit a buzzer, the system also would have to do that,” IBM spokeswoman Jennifer McTighe said. “Now Watson has its own real buzzer.”

The practice round was to be played on a stage at an IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, 38 miles north of Manhattan and across the country from the game show’s home in Culver City, Calif. A real contest among the three, to be televised Feb. 14-16, also will be played at IBM, but the date hasn’t been made public.

The winner of the televised match will be awarded $1 million. Second place gets $300,000, third place $200,000. IBM, which has headquarters in Armonk, said it would give its winnings to charity while Jennings and Rutter would give away half theirs.

Read on