Monthly Archives: May, 2013

“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are; that is the fact” Jean-Paul Sartre

“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are; that is the fact”

Jean-Paul Sartre

The Inbox | HAPSTANCE – YouTube

What Online Scams Would Look Like If They Were Real People

Cells as living calculators

Cells as living calculators

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.

Inspired by how analog electronic circuits function, the researchers created synthetic computation circuits by combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways.

The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic, thus making them more efficient than the digital circuits pursued by most synthetic biologists, according to Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu, the two senior authors on the paper, describing the circuits in the May 15 online edition of Nature.

“In analog you compute on a continuous set of numbers, which means it’s not just black and white, it’s gray as well,” says Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems group at MIT

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Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know-Marvin Minsky

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know-Marvin Minsky

What if You Were Born in Space? – YouTube

What if You Were Born in Space? – YouTube.