The Single Molecule Biophysics Lab at Rowland has a paper in
Biophysical Journal describing recent observations of DNA hairpins in a
nanopore. They apply voltage to the pore and observe how the
molecules “unzip.”
Archive for October, 2004
Paper by Single Molecule Biophysics Lab
Wednesday, October 27th, 2004Miniature turbines to power your PDA
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004Roland Piquapille discusses an article on miniature turbines at his
technology blog: “Today, our handheld devices are powered by batteries,
which are heavy
and inconvenient. Fuel cells are just arriving on the market as a
replacement. But there is a new contender: micro gas turbine engines
under development at the MIT. Engineers there shrunk jet engines to the
size of a coat button. And their blades which span an area smaller than
a dime can spin a million times per minute and produce enough
electricity to power your PDA or your cell phone.” (Source: Slashdot)
“learned enough to be ignorant”
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004A New York Times article reports that Nobel laureate physicist David Gross recently gave a lecture “The Future of Physics”
in which he outlined 25 areas of interest, where evidently physicsits
have learned enough to know what they do not know.
PLoS Medicine
Monday, October 18th, 2004Today the Public Library of Science released its second journal, PLoS
Medicine. the journal is open to all via the website.
Authors and/or their institutions pay the publication fees.
The PLoS also has foundation support. The first issues of PLoS
Biology garnered considerable attention for their original research and
it will be interesting to see if the new journal has a similar
impact. (Source: Open Access News)
Blogging and Feeds for SLA
Monday, October 18th, 2004A group of us are presenting at an SLA workshop later this month.
The topic is Blogging and Feeds. I’m talking about this blog and
my experiences with it. Jessica Baumgart, of j’s scratchpad,
has done an enormous amount of work to promote weblogs, especially in
libraries, particularly through her own blog. Shimon Rura and
Josh Ain are presenting on the weblog content management system they
call Frassle. It’s a massive
piece of work, their slogan is “never be bored again.” You can assign
multiple categories to a post or item or bookmark, for example.
Evidently they have more than 350 users. I saw a demo of the
system earlier this year and am interested in how it has evolved.
Haven’t been to Mt. Holyoke, but I have spent some time in the Pioneer
Valley and expect gorgeous sights this time of year.
Scout Report’s 10th anniversary
Friday, October 15th, 2004The Scout Report has been a indespensable resource and much-awaited
weekly reading for 10 years now. The report chronicles
interesting web sites, particularly those with an academic
orientation. They’ve also produced subject-oriented reports,
lately on technology, physical and life sciences. Congrats to the
Internet Scout Project at Wisconsin and here’s to future decades!
Rowland lab nets NIH grant for DNA sequencing technology
Thursday, October 14th, 2004Rowland’s Amit Meller won a major NIH grant for his single
molecule biophysics lab. A number of grants were
awarded for DNA sequencing projects. The Meller group has spent
several years observing the dynamics of DNA in nanopores and now plans
to develop technology enabling data collection from several pores at
once.