LOGIC in Biological News

CSHL scientists harness logic of 'Sudoku' math puzzle to vastly enhance genome-sequencing capability

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A math-based game that has taken the world by storm with its ability to delight and puzzle may now be poised to revolutionize the fast-changing world of genome sequencing and the field of medical genetics, suggests a new report by a team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbo...

Fuzzy logic water quality

A fuzzy logic approach to analyzing water quality could help reduce the number of people in the developing world forced to drink polluted and diseased water for survival. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, an Inderscience publica...

Decoding the logic of olfaction

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have succeeded in mapping the unique patterns of neural activity produced by a wide range of odors, including vanilla, skunk, fish, urine, musk, and chocolate. Revealing these distinct ?but often overlapping ?patterns of neural activity represent...

Argonne to showcase science and technology at community open house

...nto energy See how science is helping to restore sight to the blind Find out how Sudoku, science and supercomputers work together in solving logic puzzles Learn about the science of toys Walk through an accelerator Glimpse nanoparticles changing colors Battle model cars powere...

Nanophysics: Serving up Buckyballs on a silver platter

...ies of C60 are very unusual, and there is a massive research effort toward integrating it into molecular scale electronic devices like transistors and logic gates. To do this, researchers need to know how the molecule forms bonds with a metal substrate, such as silver, which is commonly used as an elect...

Our 'caveman logic' embraces ESP over evolution

...ritical treatment, although he argues that religion, itself, is not the problem but "an inevitable by-product of how our minds misperform." "Caveman logic is a whirlwind tour through the deeper recesses of our evolved mind. Hank Davis brings to bear cutting edge research from the cognitive sciences to re...

Story tips from the Departments of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab -- March 2009

...e the regions of a material with different magnetic, electric and other properties. Scientists believe that they hold a key to making great strides in logic and memory functions of tomorrow's electronic devices. Leading the collaborative effort from ORNL was the team of Peter Maksymovych, a Wigner fellow, ...

Why didn't Darwin discover Mendel's laws?

... Mendel solved the logic of inheritance in his monastery garden with no more technology than Darwin ...ative variation as the raw material of evolution meant he could not see the logic of inheritance, argues Jonathan Howard of the University of Cologne, German...

Krumlauf Lab demonstrates modulation of gene expression by protein coding regions

...ed that protein coding regions can also play a role in modulating gene expression. This work has important implications for identifying the regulatory logic contained in mammalian genomes." "Our findings provide important insight into the regulation of the formation of the anterior hindbrain," said Lea...

Field-hospital-on-a-chip project awarded to nanoengineer from UC San Diego

...nclude smart sensors capable of performing complex logic operations," said Wang, who helped to develop the ... not only measure biomarkers, but also provide the logic necessary to make a limited set of diagnoses based...g Wang and his team, however, is to get the enzyme logic system to reliably work on sensing electrodes that...

Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Precise Biometrics as a Key Player in the Non-AFIS Fingerprint Market

...ard security infrastructure. The card integrity and the user privacy are preserved due to matching decisions being taken entirely inside the card. The logic remains identical to on-card PIN verification. Therefore, the scalability, flexibility, security and ease of deployment, for which the smart card is s...

Caltech engineers build firast-ever multi-input 'plug-and-play' synthetic RNA device

... be an almost infinite number of environmental and cellular signals. This modular device processes these inputs in a manner almost identical to the logic gates used in computing; it can perform AND, NOR, NAND, and OR computations, and can perform signal filtering and signal gain operations. Smolke and W...

C. Erec Stebbins awarded prestigious EUREKA grant

...ug Abuse. Grant applications were reviewed last fall on several criteria including significance of the problem to be solved, innovation in solving it, logic of the experimental plan and investigator's research history. Unlike conventional grants, however, the EUREKA program does not emphasize the likelihoo...

Ecological Society of America criticizes administration's overhaul of the Endangered Species Act

...countable and would suffer strict repercussions if their work negatively affected endangered species or their habitats. Power says, however, that this logic would provide little incentive for agencies to assess their work as rigorously as an unbiased reviewer. "What if we allowed pharmaceutical compani...

Stem cell chicken and egg debate moves to unlikely arena: the testes

... LA JOLLA, CA logic says it has to be the niche. As air and water preceded life, so the niche, that hospitable environment that shelters adult stem cells in many tissues ...

Thinking ahead: Bacteria anticipate coming changes in their environment

...s had to appear in just the right pattern to indicate that food was on its way. "To predict mealtimes accurately, the microbes would have to solve logic problems," says Tagkopoulos, a fifth-year graduate student in electrical engineering and the principal architect of the Evolution in Variable Environm...

Origins of the brain

...nding the origins and diversity of brains and behaviour in all species" says Professor Grant, adding that "we are one step closer to understanding the logic behind the complexity of human brains" ...

Europe gets together to harness quantum physics

...tion schemas were proposed and implemented. Now with high fidelity quantum operations, ion traps are the ideal platform to build and research quantum logic components for future scalable quantum computers. The idea is that ions, which are atoms or molecules that have lost or gained electrons from their ou...

New technology for boosting vaccine efficiency

...hance their vaccines by fusing different viral proteins used in vaccines with specific transport signals directing the proteins to the proteosome. The logic was pretty straightforward. The more protein that would be targeted to a proteosome, the more protein segments generated for presentation to the immun...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- March 19, 2008

...cal reactions rather than silicon chips to perform logic functions. Among their uses would be encryption of...ecurity applications, the enzyme-based implication logic networks will be extremely important for making au...mputing Security System: Concatenated Enzyme-Based logic Gates Operating as a Biomolecular Keypad Lock D...

KGI professor contributes new insights on 'jumping genes'

...nducts research in systems biology, and he teaches courses that include the logic and methods of gene function discovery and their applications to human ther... is a pioneer in computing with molecules and designed the first artificial logic circuits with DNA. He previously conducted research at the Institute of Mol...

Yale biologists 'trick' viruses into extinction

... While human changes to the environment cause conservation biologists to worry about species extinction, Yale biologists are reversing the logic by trying to trap viruses in habitats that force their extinction, according to a report in Ecology Letters. To avoid going extinct a population m...

Darwin's famous finches and Venter's marine microbes

...pany in Carlsbad, California. The company specializes in hardware that accelerates genomic searches. "We only have one of their accelerators, but Time logic stepped up and lent us eight more," says Manning. The final computation took two weeks, but would have taken well over a century on a traditional comp...

Computer scientists join in search for ivory-billed woodpecker

...the lighting conditions, it's very difficult to capture." The robot stores images of the birds it has recorded in the hard disks of its computer, logic Supply Inc.'s S-625F. The computer as well as the cameras are housed in weatherproof cases. "If you put a normal computer out there, it wouldn't...

Fruit fly gene research may shed light on human disease processes

...different from a blood cell. Erickson cautions that there is no direct connection between sexual development in flies and that of humans, but the logic driving their cellular and molecular processes is the same. A paper by Erickson and postdoctoral student Frank Avila detailing their work on such proc...

No-mow grass may be coming to your yard soon

...tazoans. "Because one of the brassinosteroid signaling components was similar to a protein found in the Wnt signaling pathway, we thought that the logic for brassinosteroid signaling (in plants) would be very much like the Wnt pathway," said Chory. "We were wrong." Instead, brassinosteroid percepti...

Environmental tobacco smoke linked to behavior problems in children and pre-teens

...e to environmental tobacco smoke, even at extremely low levels, is associated with decreases in certain cognitive skills, including reading, math, and logic and reasoning, in children and adolescents. ...

Successful Test Of Single Molecule Switch Opens The Door To Biomolecular Electronics

...NDR) and it allows a useful device to be made with just two electrodes, not the three originally used. “NDR is the basis for memories, switches and logic elements,?Lindsay says. “It has been observed in molecules before but never in controlled conditions, never at low voltages, and not in a predictable ...

Genpathway and Baylor College of Medicine Identify New Genes in Breast Cancer

... of activation in the cortex. "This finding gives a hint that there is some logic to the way that information is being mapped onto the cortex," said Buck. "We don't know what that logic is, but it seems as if it has something to do with the molecular features o...

Leprosy microbes lead scientists to immune discovery

...g, however, in the more severe leprosy infections, meaning that the monocytes hadn't succeeded in producing those key anti-bacterial fighters. "The logic here is that because their monocytes are unable to produce the [CD1b+] cells that can mobilize T-cells, these people don't respond well and become muc...

Programmable cells: Engineer turns bacteria into living computers

...eces of DNA into cells to make them behave in the same manner as digital circuits. The cells, for example, could be made to perform basic mathematical logic and produce crisp, reliable readouts that are more commonly associated with silicon chips than biological organisms. The new paper applies similar tec...