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I like.
"Silva is among a growing number of career changers or laid-off workers who are seeking new lives in the arts. Schools and continuing-education programs do not know how many of their participants actually switch careers after taking courses, but they say they are seeing a rising demand for classes in photography, graphic design, bookbinding, and painting."
links for 2009-04-14
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I like.
"Silva is among a growing number of career changers or laid-off workers who are seeking new lives in the arts. Schools and continuing-education programs do not know how many of their participants actually switch careers after taking courses, but they say they are seeing a rising demand for classes in photography, graphic design, bookbinding, and painting."
links for 2009-04-13
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"A giant magnetoresistive (GMR) biochip based on spin valve sensor array and magnetic nanoparticle labels was developed for inexpensive, sensitive and reliable DNA detection."
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Wicked cool:
"Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that back-and-forth motion of DNA strands through a 1-nm-diameter pore exhibits sequence-specific hysteresis that arises from the reorientation of the DNA bases in the nanopore constriction. Such hysteresis of the DNA motion results in detectable changes of the electrostatic potential at the electrodes of the nanopore capacitor and in a sequence-specific drift of the DNA strand under an oscillating transmembrane bias. A strategy for sequencing DNA using electric-field pulses is suggested."
Funky bioelectronics
I'd been meaning to look into this more ever since reading about it in the quarterly tech review in The Economist, back in Dec.
There are folks who are creating nanoscale structures of pores and
particles, combining them with extremely sensitive detection tools, and
creating new breeds of macromolecule detectors.
A hard drive for GMR
One of them uses the same tech as in hard drives, used to detect magnetic particles. They are called called Giant Magnetoresistive Sensors (a gnarly review for you hard-core geeks).
As Shan Wang from Stanford says,
"Magnetic nanotags (MNTs) are a promising alternative to fluorescent
labels in biomolecular detection assays, because minute quantities of
MNTs can be detected with inexpensive giant magnetoresistive (GMR)
sensors, such as spin valve (SV) sensors."
labels in biomolecular detection assays, because minute quantities of
MNTs can be detected with inexpensive giant magnetoresistive (GMR)
sensors, such as spin valve (SV) sensors."
Wicked.
And Wang has an example of how this can be used, in this case, in the detection of Human Papiloma Virus.
Pores and beads
The other methond is the sequencing of DNA by passing it through a nanopore. Because, like beads on a string, as DNA passes through a pore each base has a slightly different (and detectable) electrostatic effect and one can read out the sequence as the strand goes through the pore. The only person I found actually playing with this was Aleksei Aksimentiev from whom I took the image above.
Surface issues
When I was doing biochemistry, I used a ton of specialized equipment to measure enzymatic activity. But one that I never got a chance to use was a gizmo from Pharmacia that took advantage of a funky effect called "surface plasmon resonance." The only way I can describe it is an effect by which mass on one side of a surface affects the refraction of light on the other side of the surface (Wikipedia is not any clearer). In that way, you can have something binding on one side of a chip that is then detected spectroscopically on the other side of the chip, with great sensitivity and in real time. From that, you can calculate the on and off rates for molecules binding, which is what a lot of the biochemistry I did was about.
In any case, it's always interesting when hard-core physics meets biology. While I start getting glazed eyes when getting too close to physics, the best parts of my training were when physics and physical chemistry helped explain a phenomenon we were studying. I would say the strength of my training was the mix of physics, chemistry, and biology that made me see systems at many interacting levels, each contributing to the model and experiments.
And, as in most multi-disciplinary endeavors, these folks, above, mixing hard-core physics and biochemistry are also adding to a richness that either disciplines on their own could not.
Exciting.
links for 2009-04-12
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"The changing way many people get their news, combined with tough economic times, has made it hard for almost all papers… And according to some projections, that trend is not likely to change anytime soon, with the Internet still savaging the media business model and the economy in the midst of a historic slump.
Perhaps this scenario could have been avoided under different management, but most likely not, said Mulvoy, who retired in 2000 after 35 years at the Globe. People at the paper saw much of this coming, he said; they just weren't sure how to stop it. … Mulvoy himself led meetings, he said, talking about the Internet and how to defray the blow it might deliver to the newspaper. "But nobody had any answers then," he said. "And nobody has any answers now.""
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"With four major newspaper companies seeking bankruptcy protection in recent months, much attention has been focused on the dire straits that daily papers find themselves in. But weeklies are having a difficult time, too. The wilting economy and falling advertising revenue are forcing some of Boston's weekly papers to scale back dramatically."
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"The newspaper business was a victim of its enormous success," Mutter said. "Because their revenues continued to grow up to 2005, about 10 years after most people heard about the Internet, they put very little effort and energy into trying to imagine how the world might change and what their position would be in a changed world."
links for 2009-04-11
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A hidden bike hackspace in Cambridge.
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Good article, if with a few myopic mistakes.
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"All musicians can recall the moment when they fell in love with their instruments. For guitarist Quinn Sullivan, that moment came when he was 4."
Hackspaces on the mind
I don't know why, but ever since returning from SXSW09 I've been wondering about hackspaces. As you might know, hackspaces are like a nerd collective, where there is equipment to use, friendly folks to show you how to use them, and a rich environment for play and exploration.
While writing this post, a quick search for hackspaces led me to a recent article from Wired
about folks flocking to hackspaces, so I guess I am feeling a vibe
that's going around. The article provides a good overview of hackspaces. Despite what the article says, hackspaces are not new. And hack spaces are not just focused on electronics, either.
Being a bit of a bike tinkerer, the hackspaces I think of are more like the LA Bicycle Kitchen and the Broadway Bicycle School. Back in the 80s, I was inspired by the Broadway Bicycle School, and after reading about the LA Bicycle Kitchen a few years back, toyed with the idea of starting up a similar sort of thing.
There are also ample examples of shared work spaces. My buddies at Republic Publishing hang out a lot at The Hospital in Covent Garden. Todd Bida pointed me to the Cambridge Incubation Center. But these are shared facilities for small businesses and independent workers. And, there are tons of examples of youth centers that provide a hangout-homework-chilllax atmosphere for teens (yes, scoped out a plan for one of these, as well).
Indeed, hackspaces take the shared workspace, add a dash of cooperative thinking, with a healthy dose of tools to create something special for folks to just make something in a supportive environment. Shared spaces, as described above, are usually "co-existence" places, where folks work in parallel, with little cross-fertilization (and that's OK, too). In my mind, I would like a more interactive and social environment (for example, I asked my buddies from Republic how much they interact with others from The Hospital).
With my latest urge to get back into science, I wonder if there might be a market for a, say, DIY biology hackspace. The capital costs for hacking biology are huge, what with incubators, autoclaves, shakers, pipettes, disposables, and the like. In labs I worked in, the burn rate was something like $1500 per person per month (full-time hard-core research, of course). And start-up costs usually were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that speaks for the benefits of shared equipment that comes with a hackspace. And the rise of synthbio and DIYbio suggests that there might be a need for some sort of bio hack space.
Of course, a whole ton of barriers crop up in my head: regulation, training, disposal, licenses, and so on. But just a matter of detail, right?
Image: mine
links for 2009-04-10
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Am I a buggy-whip person to think that newspapers still have more to give? TV didn't kill radio. The Web didn't kill books.
Are we just seeing an old calcified biz model that is letting a good thing suffocate?
Sure, cars killed the horse carriage, but they were quite overlapping. The Web and newpapers overlap, but are not the same thing. So why this sudden die-off?
"With The New York Times Co. threatening to close The Boston Globe if the Globe's unions don't accept $20 million in concessions, the fate of the paper has become a conversation starter – and stopper – among those near the nexus of power and money in this town. Who, the question goes, might be lining up to buy the newspaper and possibly stave off a shutdown?"
Hm, I'm also very optimistic and have lately been seeing biz opportunities in many things folks are shunning. Buffet says "Be greedy when folks are cautious, cautious when folks are greedy."
links for 2009-04-09
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"The Old North Church in Boston, where two lanterns signaled the departure of British regulars to Lexington, has been immortalized for what happened atop its 277-year-old Medford bricks. But far below, in a dark and dusty crypt where the public rarely visits, the stories of hundreds of early Bostonians have long lay dormant and forgotten."
links for 2009-04-08
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via @vesterinen "At least all of this nonsense shows that the newspaper industry has moved from “denial” to “anger”. They just need to get through “bargaining” and “depression” before they finally reach “acceptance”."