By Sara Goudarzi

“That high school math problem with a page-long solution was a cakewalk compared to a recent mathematics answer that would ink an area the size of Manhattan if written out in small print.

A total of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists from several countries worked for four years to successfully map the inner working of E8 one of the most complicated structures in math, a 248-dimensional object. The findings were reported today by the American Institute of Mathematics.

“E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood,” said project leader Jeffrey Adams, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. “This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large-scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems.”

The mapping of E8, according to researchers, may very well have unforeseen implications in mathematics and physics which wont be evident for years to come.

Underlying symmetrical objects such as spheres and cylinders is something called a Lie group”a mathematical group invented by the 19th century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie to study symmetry. E8 is an example of a Lie group.

“This is an exciting breakthrough,” said Peter Sarnak, a researcher at Princeton University. “Understanding and classifying the representations of E8 and Lie groups has been critical to understanding phenomena in many different areas of mathematics and science, including algebra, geometry, number theory, physics and chemistry. This project will be invaluable for future mathematicians and scientists.”

The result of E8 and all its representations is 60 gigabytes in size, enough to store 45 continuous days of music in MP3 format. In comparison, the Human Genome Project holding the entire genetic code of a cell is less than a gigabyte in size.”

A really great success story click on the Headline to read the entire article via Live Science

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“Scores of eminent scientists from India and the US discussed several key issues in the field of nano computing at the Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on soft, quantum and nano computing being held here.

The workshop, held at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute, began Friday with a talk by Nikhil Ranjan Pal, professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He spoke on ‘Fuzzy Rule Based Systems: Applications, Design Issues, Solutions and Open Problems: Where do we stand?’.

Pal, an authority in the area of Fuzzy Systems, is a Fellow at the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is currently a visiting fellow in Taiwan as well.

He stressed how effective the tool of Fuzzy Logic was in a variety of applications ranging from satellite image processing to medical image processing for the detection of cancer in the young. While covering a wide range of issues in the field, he also explained them with great lucidity.

G. Ramnath, professor at the Rennsselaer Polytechnic Institute, US, talked on ‘Transmuting Nanostructures for Nanocomputing Technologies’.

The world of computing is set to be revolutionized with nano devices (nano = 10-9 m) wherein a few atoms would be manipulated to do computational functions to produce powerful computers that would make the computers of today appear pedestrian in comparison.

Ramnath detailed the work being done by developing carbon nanotube architectures to produce nanodevice architectures of the future.

‘Towards understanding the origin of genetic languages’ was the topic of Apoorva Patel, professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Lov K. Grover of Bell Labs, US, who chaired the session, said that Patel had made the presentation at his institute earlier and had been rated as one of the five most important talks ever given at Bell Labs.

In his talk, Patel explained how nature processes information in creating species with the lowest amount of information processing in the most optimal manner.

He provided pointers for answering the most complicated questions like ‘How did I come into being?’, ‘How does nature evolve life?’ and ‘What is Life?’.

Bringing together difficult concepts from Biology and Computer Science, Patel gave very convincing answers to some of these difficult questions on life”

I read this story off the wire you can read the entire story by clicking on the headline link was wondering if anyone out there has the speech in any format would love to hear more.

From Technology Review

Written By Prachi Patel-Predd

“A 15-nanometer-thick porous silicon membrane could lead to microfluidics filters and make protein purification and blood dialysis more efficient.

A porous silicon membrane that is a few nanometers thick can quickly filter liquids and separate molecules that are very close in size, researchers at the University of Rochester report in this week’s Nature. The new membrane could lead to efficient protein purification for use in research and drug discovery. It could also act roughly 10 times faster than current membranes used for blood dialysis, the artificial purification of blood. In addition, the membrane could be employed as a filter to separate molecules in microfluidics devices used to study DNA and proteins and as a substrate for growing neurological stem cells.”

Read the entire story by clicking on the headline but I just wanted to point out this could lead to other things like being able to bring down the levels of a patients HIV or Hepatitis virus in the blood by being able to filter the blood thru a purifier.

1 beer

1 glass of wine

Guess the answer and you would have passed my drivers test I choose the shot I mean some bacardi 151 vs Miller light ? The correct  answer is none they all contain the same amount. Well ofcourse I am out to prove my thoery is right which contains more alcohol then I am writing a letter to the State to have the question reworded or taken off the list. Well looks like I will be car pooling again this month since I can not take the test again for another 30 days.

By Scott Hillis

“Intel Corp. and IBM have announced one of the biggest advances in transistors in four decades, overcoming a frustrating obstacle by ensuring microchips can get even smaller and more powerful.

The breakthrough, achieved via separate research efforts and announced on Friday, involves using an exotic new material to make transistors the tiny switches that are the building blocks of microchips.

The technology involves a layer of material that regulates the flow of electricity through transistors.

“At the transistor level, we haven’t changed the basic materials since the 1960s. So it’s a real big breakthrough,” said Dan Hutcheson, head of VLSI Research, an industry consultancy.

“Moore’s Law was coming to a grinding halt,” he added, referring to the industry maxim laid down by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

The result of Moore’s Law has been smaller and faster chips and their spread into a wide array of consumer products that now account for the bulk of the industry’s $250 billion in annual sales.

The latest breakthrough means Intel, IBM and others can proceed with technology roadmaps that call for the next generation of chips to be made with circuitry as small as 45 nanometers, about 1/2000th the width of a human hair.”

From me

This is such great news for the tech industry everything from Mobile devices to Games will be better faster and more colorful than ever before. When I read the entire article on the Reutuers web site I felt chills go down my spine and my hair raise up on my arms which is so creepy but cool so I knew right then I had to blog about it. Be sure to click on the link and read the article all the way thru. I think whatever company makes hafnium a silvery metal soon to be used in the next generation of chips will see there Stock sky rocket on the market.

Inactive enzymes entombed in tiny honeycomb-shaped holes in silica can spring to life, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have found.

The discovery came when they decided to salvage enzymes that had been in a refrigerator long past their expiration date. Enzymes are proteins that are not actually alive but come from living cells and perform chemical conversions.

To the research team’s surprise, enzymes that should have fizzled months before perked right up when entrapped in a nanomaterial called functionalized mesoporous silica, or FMS. The result points the way for exploiting these enzyme traps in food processing, decontamination, biosensor design and any other pursuit that requires controlling catalysts and sustaining their activity.

“There’s a school of thought that the reason enzymes work better in cells than in solution is because the concentration of enzymes surrounded by other biomolecules in cells is about 1,000 to 10,000 time more than in standard biochemistry lab conditions,” said Eric Ackerman, PNNL chief scientist and senior author of a related study that appears today in the journal Nanotechnology. “This crowding is thought to stabilize and keep enzymes active.”

The silica-spun FMS pores, hexagons about 30 nanometers in diameter, mimic the crowding of cells. Ackerman, lead author Chenghong Lei and colleagues said crowding is important because it induces an unfolded, free-floating protein to refold; upon refolding, it reactivates and becomes capable of catalyzing thousands of reactions a second.

The FMS is made first, and the enzymes are added later. This is important, the authors said, because other schemes for entrapping enzymes usually incorporate the material and enzymes in one harsh mixture that can cripple enzyme function forever.

In this study, the authors reported having “functionalized” the silica pores by lining them with compounds that varied depending on the enzyme to be ensnared — amine and carboxyl groups carrying charges opposite that of three common, off-the-shelf biocatalysts: glucose oxidase (GOX), glucose isomerase (GI) and organophosphorus hydrolase (OPH).

Picture an enzyme in solution, floating unfolded like a mop head suspended in a water bucket. When that enzyme comes into contact with a pore, the protein is pulled into place by the oppositely charged FMS and squeezed into active shape inside the pore. So loaded, the pore is now open for business; substances in the solution that come into contact with the enzyme can now be catalyzed into the desired product. For example, GI turns glucose to fructose, and standard tests for enzyme activity confirmed that FMS-GI was as potent or better at making fructose as enzyme in solution. OPH activity doubled, while GOX activity varied from 30 percent to 160 percent, suggesting that the enzyme’s orientation in the pore is important.

“It could be that in some cases the active site, the part of the enzyme that needs to be in contact with the chemical to be converted, was pointing the wrong way and pressed tightly against the walls of the pore,” Ackerman said.

To show that the enzymes were trapped inside the FMS pores, the team stained the protein-FMS complex with gold nanoparticles and documented the enzyme-in-pore complex through electron microscopy. A spectroscopic analysis of the proteins squeezed into their active conformation turned up no new folds, evidence that they had neatly refolded rather than been forcibly wadded into the pore.

Researchers are developing smart “nanocarriers” for drug delivery and diagnostics.

By Kevin Bullis

Using parts of living cells in a smart nanotechnology-based system, researchers in Switzerland have demonstrated a “nanocarrier” that can target specific types of cells and light up in response to conditions in their immediate environment.

The work is part of a growing effort by scientists worldwide to develop nano devices that can circulate in the bloodstream, slip stealthily past the body’s immune system, attach to cancer or inflammatory cells (an important ability in diseases such as atherosclerosis and arthritis), and deliver a deadly drug payload–destroying some of the toughest diseases without the often debilitating side effects that can accompany chemotherapy (see “Nanomedicine”).

Already, early versions of such nano-based treatments have been approved for breast cancer. But Patrick Hunziker, a physician at University Hospital Basel, and Wolfgang Meier, professor of chemistry at the University of Basel, are attempting to trigger the release of the drugs at more precise locations and at release rates adjusted to have the most effect on a particular disease.

Was surfing by Yahoo the other day and ran accross a video from the 9 spot from Yahoo television featuring an electric sports car called Tesla. After watching the video I understood why this makes sense, the car emits nothing from the tail pipe and burns no fossils fuels, and if your like me and use solar panels then the sun would charge it up meaning no more gas. The company founded by the same man who made paypal and some other Silicon Valley big wigs. As always click on the headline link to see the full story.