Chemical bonds
jhalper | August 31, 2015
One day in the future, we may be treating our ailments with microbiotic combinations designed specifically to correct imbalances in our personal microbiomes. We’ll bring our prescriptions on rewritable paper and pay using shimmery optical chips embedded in our cell phone cases or maybe our jewelry. Or we’ll be waiting in our doctor’s office for a simple test of our microbiogenome to see if a light-based nanoparticle delivery treatment is working, while watching iridescent optical displays that change as we move...
These future scenarios (and many more) are all imaginary, but they are…
jhalper | August 10, 2014Once again, there are three new pieces online on our website, each wonderful in its own way. But Haiku just didn’t seem to fit this batch. So, with apologies to the scientists, here are three limericks on the newest Institute research. As before, follow the links to get to our website.
(Incidentally, there is some precedent for limerick writing at the Weizmann Institute. The late Prof. Amikam Aharoni, who also wrote some serious stuff on ferromagnetism, was known for his limericks.)
The Quasar
There once was a baby black hole
That went for a short little stroll
It zigged and it zagged…
jhalper | May 15, 2014At the level of biomolecules, life boils down to two basic principles: sequence and folding. We know, for example, that the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA contains our genetic blueprint, but the way that our DNA is folded and wrapped up in each chromosome helps determine which genes are easily accessible for copying. Proteins – sequences of amino acids – fold into intricate shapes before assuming their duties. So it is no surprise that the third main molecular sequence in the cell – the RNA, made up of single strands of nucleotides – folds as well. Nucleotides are built to pair up – DNA…
esiegel | August 1, 2013“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
The story of the Universe is the story of us all; we all share the same cosmic history, coming from a hot, dense state some 13.8 billion years ago known as the Big Bang and emerging after billions of years of cosmic evolution to the Universe we know and love today.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
It's a beautiful story -- and one I've told before -- but it might seem, at least from our perspective, that something is missing from the astrophysicist's version of events. Yes, we…
jhalper | October 22, 2012“The public, blog-fueled controversy over the utilization of arsenate instead of phosphate in bacteria was, in the end, a demonstration of what is truly right with scientific quests,” says Prof. Dan Tawfik. “The original findings (that certain bacteria can use arsenate instead of phosphate) may have been overhyped. The research itself may have been underwhelming. But what ensued is exactly what should have happened: The correcting mechanisms that are intrinsic to science kicked in. Other experimental groups examined the claims in their labs and found them to be unsupported. And new scientific…