Playing video games isn’t exactly rocket science but, thanks to a crowdsourcing computer game developed by University of Washington researchers, it can be molecular biology – and can offer hope to sufferers of tough-to-crack diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and HIV.
Like John Henry versus the steam hammer or Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue, Foldit players show that humans still have a thing or two to teach machines; unlike Henry, who died, or Kasparov, who lost in a rematch, protein-folding gamers still have an edge over the brute-force number crunching of supercomputers.
We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
The Pascaline, an early digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was the quintessential Renaissance man. After all, how many people have a computer language, a religious argument, a triangle, a mathematical theorem, a law of physics and a unit of pressure named after them? Here was a man who could not only pose a philosophical wager, but also invent the system for calculating its odds and a digital calculator with which to tally the results.
It is unusual for a prodigy to stray so widely and successfully from their first area of excellence, but, as Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”
Popular television crime dramas, with their super-sleuth forensics teams and equipment so cutting-edge it borders on science fiction, have left us with an odd picture of what forensic pathologists do. In the name of plot convenience and ratings, show runners have given us worlds in which good-looking medical examiners obtain results almost instantly, deriving volumes of detailed information from minuscule, improbably preserved clues.
The phenomenon has become so pronounced that some decry a trend of unrealistic evidentiary expectations among jurors, dubbing it the “CSI Effect.” It’s time to set the record straight and find out…
