The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.
Category: biological – Page 174
Scientists Successfully “Wake” Microbes That Had Remained Dormant for 100 Million Years
Scientists have successfully managed to wake a series of microbes that had remained “asleep” for at least 100 million years. The microbes that existed during the dinosaurs’ time have shown traces of growth in the latest studies.
A team of scientists in the US and Japan says that these prehistoric microorganisms began to grow and divide despite having entered an energy-saving state when dinosaurs were still walking on Earth.
The microbes belonged to ten different bacteria groups and were recovered from sediments mined in 2010 at the bottom of the South Pacific Gyre, one of the most deserted parts of the ocean in terms of nutrients.
The Power of Synthetic Biology
Check out this amazing video about Synthetic Biology! (Credit: Vasil Hnãtiuk, Denis Sibilev, and Andrei Myshev)
DeepMind’s AlphaFold Is Close to Solving One of Biology’s Greatest Challenges
OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.
If we know a protein’s structure, we can make educated guesses about its function. And by mapping thousands of protein structures, we can begin to decipher the biology of life.
Synthetic biology reinvents development
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can break under a set of conditions.
How chromosomes evolve to create new forms of life
3D printing is a universal process in the sense that pretty much any part that can be drawn up in a CAD program can be printed, at least within a certain resolution. Machining a part on a mill or lathe, while having the advantage of greater accuracy and material options, is a slightly less universal process in that many possible designs that exist in theory could never be machined. A hollow sphere can easily be printed, but a ball could never be milled as a single part into a hollow sphere—unless you happen to have a milling machine tiny enough to fit inside the ball. But what about biological parts, and whole animals? How universal, from a design perspective, is growth?