Ok, so there are some press-releases popping up now from the University of Washington, about a new video game that is making some bold claims (or at least has some bold goals), their have made a video game where us mere mortals are allowed to contort proteins into 3D shapes in hopes of creating something that is of actual use (link to game website).
The game is based on the actual physics of proteins, and the hope is that gamers around the world will embrace it and gain a sixth sense of sorts to building proteins in a good way, in fact, David Baker, one of the biochemists working on the project, says that his 13 year old son is better at the in-game protein bending then he is. So i guess they’re hoping that kids will gain an intuitive understanding of the physics involved and contort the proteins accordingly, utilizing the natural 3D puzzle solving skills that we humans have.
You might think that it’d be easier to just have a computer have a go at brute-forcing it’s way through it (try every permutation and see what works best), well they’ve already tried that and the number of different proteins needed to be tested are ridiculous, according to the article, it would still take centuries to solve even if all the computers in the world worked on it. So this is why they are trying to come up with an innovative way of finding new breakthroughs in medical science.
I tried downloading the game and playing it, and it was fairly easy to get started and work through the introduction part that explains to you the basic tools at your disposal (even worked fine with wine on my Linux computer). I do have serious doubts about the hefty amount of buzzwords used in their press-release though, take for example this line from one of the scientists:
Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.
Plus of course the mention of perhaps curing HIV with it. This is obviously just shrewd PR work, as it is something that makes for quite catchy titles (”Will the next noble prize winner be a 12 year old gamer?”, “Will gaming nerds cure HIV?” etc), but it almost always seems that science press-releases with too many buzz-words are too good to be true.
I really wish i knew more about biology/chemistry so I’d be more qualified to comment on this whole thing (being a physicist myself), as i DO find it to be a very interesting idea, regardless of my distaste for their PR campaign. They claim that very soon they will be holding competitions for people to make proteins that might be of actual use in the medical industry and such, where the top proteins in the competition will actually be produced and tested in petri dishes at Dr. Bakers lab (and given credit if they publish an article on it).
I’m curious though, how they actually intend on picking winners out of possibly thousands of protein structures submitted, as they don’t know beforehand exactly what protein will solve whatever problem it is they have at hand, but that might just be skepticism from someone that does not grasp this field well enough.
Well the title may be a bit dramatic, but i wanted to do a quick post on binary (0’s and 1’s) and i can only assume that Hollywood is right and computers are indeed plotting our inevitable destruction (and are presumably doing so in binary). Bottomline is, i once again saw a pretty cool video on youtube and wanted to do a quick post about it. Unlike the Brian Cox TED-Talk video though, i know a bit (get it?!) about binary so i’ll explain a little. Here’s the video if you want to skip he explenation, but if you don’t understand how binary math works it might be fun to read below the video first and then watch it (although i’ll admit it’s not as exciting as the video).
Binary addition is one of the simplest thing you can do with binary numbers really, and it gives a neat little window into how computers work (on a very simple level anyway). So lets say you have 3 bits, so your binary code will be any permutation of 3 0’s or 1’s, like 000, 010 101 etc. First off, we need to know how we read binary numbers, so lets call the 3 bits for a,b and c, so our number is abc. We start by numbering each decimal place, counting up from zero, starting from the right, so c is in the zeroth place, b in the first, and a in the second place. We then take our bit, and multiply it by two lifted to the power of whatever decimal place we are in and add them all up. So the mathematical equation would look like this: abc=a*2^2 + b*2^1 + c*2^0. Now we know that 2^0=1, 2^1=2 and 2^2=4 (next places are 8, 16,32 etc. as you see in the video). So putting it all together we see that 101=1*4+0*2+1*1=5.
What happens if i want to add two binary numbers together? Well the math rules are really quite simple, 0+0=0, 1+0=1, 0+1=1 and 1+1=0 (but here you carry the 1 over to the next decimal). So lets say we are looking at 001 (1) and 010 (2), we start and take the first number to the right in both numbers, that’s 1+0=1, second number in both added together is 0+1=1 while the third is 0+0=1, so in the end we get 011, and using the knowledge we had before we see that it’s 3, which is obviously the correct answre for 2+1. These are clearly exceedingly simple numbers, but expanding this into much larger numbers is really just a formality of adding more bits, it obviously takes longer to calculate, but the method is the exact same.
Hopefully that was clear enough, writing math in HTML isn’t the most end-user friendly thing in the world, but as always we can recommend the wikipedia article on it, if you still have questions.
Transistors are an electronic component used in all digital computing today, and the amount of transistors on a CPU chip has grown exponentially since it’s advent. Check out this video below made by Gizmodo to celebrate the latest Intel chipset. It shows how the number of transistors has grown through the years (also known as Moores law). Note that the symbol that looks like a “u” is the greek lower-case letter “mu” that stands for micrometers, which is 1000 nanometers (nm), or 0.000001 meters. It refers to the size of the transistors.
So silicon is what’s used to make these badboys of computing, and they are believed to break down and become unusable if you go below 10nm. This roadblock has not been met yet, but it is not far off as intels latest chipset, as you can see in the video, is at 45nm. This is where the researchers from the University of Manchester come in, as they claim to have created a transistor out of a material called graphene that is about one molecule thick, or around a single nanometer. This could lead to a technology that would be able to replace the silicon transistors once they reach their limit, and keep the rising speed of computers going.
It should be said though, that this is not something that’s about to hit the market anytime soon. They have no viable way of creating these transistors, as they have no way of controlling how the graphene forms. To make the transistor they already have, it was basically just left to chance to get the shape they needed, as there is no known way yet to cut the graphene. Obviously this method can not be used in mass-production, but at least they now know of a material that is capable of functioning beyond the size threshold of silicon.
If you have been studying physics or similar, you know that it can sometimes be hard to visualize how a system will behave. Even in classical mechanics, which is probably the field where our intuition can help us the most, it would sometimes be nice to be able to draw everything on a computer, and turn on gravity or other physical effects to see what happens. I know I thought a lot about that.
Well, just recently I found a program that can do just this. I could go on and tell you everything about it, but just take a look at this video and see for yourself. It can simulate gravity, friction, motors, liquids and a lot of other things.
It’s called Phun, and it’s fun as hell. It comes for Linux as well as Windows, with Mac support coming soon. If you want to see all the crazy things people have been doing with this software, go to their webpage or do a Youtube search for Phun.
And if you make something cool with it, which we’re pretty sure you will, send the file to us and we’ll rate the coolness of it, and bring the results in a post.
In my science studies or otherwise nerdy hours, I’ve come across my share of programming languages, but nothing quite like this one. It’s a programming language based on Lolspeak, the badly writen english that we’ve all seen on internet chatrooms etc.
The canonical hello world example goes something like this:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE
The code almost speaks for itself. The program is started with a HAI, the STDIO module is loaded, “HAI WORLD” is printed and the program is terminated with KTHXBYE.
Now this is FUN. The next example introduces exception handling:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE
New levels in computing power has allowed scientists at the University of Illinois to correlate the motion of a physical and a virtual pendulum perfectly in real time. By having data sent from the physical to the virtual pendulum and back via a motor to the physical pendulum, the system behaves as a mixed reality where it is no longer possible to tell which pendulum influences the other. As physicist Alfred Hubler from the experiment explains,”The line blurs between what’s real and what isn’t”.
By being able to retrieve, simulate and act real-time on physical data, the scientists are actually able to make the real pendulum swing as if it was frictionless because it is always correlated with a simulated, frictionless one.While this has no obvious use, other than coolness, the technology can bring incredible advanced in roboting and automation. Think of a car hooked up to a perfect-driving-simulation and correlated in real-time, an industrial robot arm corrected on the fly by comparing the motion to a simulation or the electronic shadow, following your tinyest move…
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Ok, so there are 
If you have been studying physics or similar, you know that it can sometimes be hard to visualize how a system will behave. Even in classical mechanics, which is probably the field where our intuition can help us the most, it would sometimes be nice to be able to draw everything on a computer, and turn on gravity or other physical effects to see what happens. I know I thought a lot about that.
In a quick post, I just cant help it but mention something I fell over the last day, the 
New levels in computing power has allowed scientists at the University of Illinois to correlate the motion of a physical and a virtual pendulum perfectly in real time. By having data sent from the physical to the virtual pendulum and back via a motor to the physical pendulum, the system behaves as a