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John McCaskill
John S. McCaskill (born 1957) is an Australian chemist who works in a wide variety of fields ranging from theoretical biochemistry to novel computation to artificial life. Biography After graduating from Sydney University in 1978 ( R. G. Gilbert advisor) and obtaining his PhD (D. Phil.) in 1982 as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, McCaskill joined the group of Nobel prize-winner Manfred Eigen at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He became Professor for Theoretical Biochemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 1992, founding a multidisciplinary research group in Biomolecular Information Processing (BioMIP) at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology (imb Jena), a field which he pioneered for 25 years while holding positions at the GMD (National Research Center for Information Technology), the Fraunhofer Society, Ruhr University Bochum, the Santa Fe Institute, and the European Centre for Living Technology at the Ca' Fosca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public university, public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's six sandstone universities. The university comprises eight academic faculties and university schools, through which it offers bachelor, master and doctoral degrees. The university consistently ranks highly both nationally and internationally. QS World University Rankings ranked the university top 40 in the world. The university is also ranked first in Australia and fourth in the world for QS graduate employability. It is one of the first universities in the world to admit students solely on academic merit, and opened their doors to women on the same basis as men. Five Nobel Prize, Nobel and two Crafoord Prize, Crafoord laureates have been affiliated with the university as graduates and faculty. The university has educated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fitness Landscape
Fitness may refer to: * Physical fitness, a state of health and well-being of the body * Fitness (biology), an individual's ability to propagate its genes * Fitness (cereal), a brand of breakfast cereals and granola bars * ''Fitness'' (magazine), a women's magazine, focusing on health and exercise * Fitness and figure competition, a form of physique training, related to bodybuilding * Fitness approximation, a method of function optimization evolutionary computation or artificial evolution methodologies * Fitness function, a particular type of objective function in mathematics and computer science * "Fitness", a 2018 song by Lizzo Melissa Viviane Jefferson (born April 27, 1988), known professionally as Lizzo, is an American singer, rapper, and flutist. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she moved to Houston, Texas with her family when she was 10 years old. After college she ... See also * FitNesse, a web server, a wiki, and a software testing tool * Survival of the fittest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-organization
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in many physical, chemical, biological, robotic, and cognitive systems. Examples of self-organization include crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, neural circuits, and black markets. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiple Displacement Amplification
Multiple displacement amplification (MDA) is a DNA amplification technique. This method can rapidly amplify minute amounts of DNA samples to a reasonable quantity for genomic analysis. The reaction starts by annealing random hexamer primers to the template: DNA synthesis is carried out by a high fidelity enzyme, preferentially Φ29 DNA polymerase. Compared with conventional PCR amplification techniques, MDA does not employ sequence-specific primers but amplifies all DNA, generates larger-sized products with a lower error frequency, and works at a constant temperature. MDA has been actively used in whole genome amplification (WGA) and is a promising method for application to single cell genome sequencing and sequencing-based genetic studies. Background Many biological and forensic cases involving genetic analysis require sequencing of DNA from minute amounts of sample, such as DNA from uncultured single cells or trace amounts of tissue collected from crime scenes. Conventional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autonomously Replicating Sequence
An autonomously replicating sequence (ARS) contains the origin of replication in the yeast genome. It contains four regions (A, B1, B2, and B3), named in order of their effect on plasmid stability. The A-Domain is highly conserved, any mutation abolishes origin function. Mutations on B1, B2, and B3 will diminish, but not prevent functioning of the origin. Element A is highly conserved, consisting of the consensus sequence: (where ''Y'' is either pyrimidine and ''R'' is either purine). When this element is mutated, the ARS loses all activity. As seen above the ARS are considerably A-T rich which makes it easy for replicative proteins to disrupt the H-bonding in that area. ORC protein complex (origin recognition complex) is bound at the ARS throughout the cell cycle, allowing replicative proteins access to the ARS. Mutational analysis for the yeast ARS elements have shown that any mutation in the B1, B2 and B3 regions result in a reduction of function of the ARS element. A mutati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spiegelman's Monster
Spiegelman's Monster is the name given to an RNA chain of only 218 nucleotides that is able to be reproduced by the RNA replication enzyme RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, also called RNA replicase. It is named after its creator, Sol Spiegelman, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who first described it in 1965. Description Spiegelman introduced RNA from a simple bacteriophage Qβ (Qβ) into a solution which contained Qβ's RNA replicase, some free nucleotides, and some salts. In this environment, the RNA started to be replicated. After a while, Spiegelman took some RNA and moved it to another tube with fresh solution. This process was repeated. Shorter RNA chains were able to be replicated faster, so the RNA became shorter and shorter as selection favored speed. After 74 generations, the original strand with 4,500 nucleotide bases ended up as a dwarf genome with only 218 bases. This short RNA sequence replicated very quickly in these unnatural circumstances. Further ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Cell
An artificial cell, synthetic cell or minimal cell is an engineered particle that mimics one or many functions of a Cell (biology), biological cell. Often, artificial cells are biological or polymeric membranes which enclose biologically active materials. As such, liposomes, polymersomes, nanoparticles, microcapsules and a number of other particles can qualify as artificial cells. The terms "artificial cell" and "synthetic cell" are used in a variety of different fields and can have different meanings, as it is also reflected in the different sections of this article. Some stricter definitions are based on the assumption that the term "cell" directly relates to Cell (biology), biological cells and that these structures therefore have to be alive (or part of a living organism) and, further, that the term "artificial" implies that these structures are artificially built from the bottom-up, i.e. from basic components. As such, in the area of synthetic biology, an artificial cell can be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microscale Chemistry
Microscale chemistry (often referred to as small-scale chemistry, in German: Chemie im Mikromaßstab) is an analytical method and also a teaching method widely used at school and at university levels, working with small quantities of chemical substances. While much of traditional chemistry teaching centers on multi-gramme preparations, milligrammes of substances are sufficient for microscale chemistry. In universities, modern and expensive lab glassware is used and modern methods for detection and characterization of the produced substances are very common. In schools and in many countries of the Southern hemisphere, small-scale working takes place with low-cost and even no-cost material. There has always been a place for small-scale working in qualitative analysis, but the new developments can encompass much of chemistry a student is likely to meet. History There are two main strands of the modern approach. One is based on the idea that many of the experiments associated with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programmable Matter
Programmable matter is matter which has the ability to change its physical properties (shape, density, moduli, conductivity, optical properties, etc.) in a programmable fashion, based upon user input or autonomous sensing. Programmable matter is thus linked to the concept of a material which inherently has the ability to perform information processing. History Programmable matter is a term originally coined in 1991 by Toffoli and Margolus to refer to an ensemble of fine-grained computing elements arranged in space. Their paper describes a computing substrate that is composed of fine-grained compute nodes distributed throughout space which communicate using only nearest neighbor interactions. In this context, programmable matter refers to compute models similar to cellular automata and lattice gas automata. The CAM-8 architecture is an example hardware realization of this model. This function is also known as "digital referenced areas" (DRA) in some forms of self-replicati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Field Programmable Gate Array
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, but this is increasingly rare due to the advent of electronic design automation tools. FPGAs contain an array of programmable logic blocks, and a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects allowing blocks to be wired together. Logic blocks can be configured to perform complex combinational functions, or act as simple logic gates like AND and XOR. In most FPGAs, logic blocks also include memory elements, which may be simple flip-flops or more complete blocks of memory. Many FPGAs can be reprogrammed to implement different logic functions, allowing flexible reconfi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Systolic Array
In parallel computer architectures, a systolic array is a homogeneous network of tightly coupled data processing units (DPUs) called cells or nodes. Each node or DPU independently computes a partial result as a function of the data received from its upstream neighbours, stores the result within itself and passes it downstream. Systolic arrays were first used in Colossus, which was an early computer used to break German Lorenz ciphers during World War II. Due to the classified nature of Colossus, they were independently invented or rediscovered by H. T. Kung and Charles Leiserson who described arrays for many dense linear algebra computations (matrix product, solving systems of linear equations, LU decomposition, etc.) for banded matrices. Early applications include computing greatest common divisors of integers and polynomials. They are sometimes classified as Multiple instruction, single data, multiple-instruction single-data (MISD) architectures under Flynn's taxonomy, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microreactor
A microreactor or microstructured reactor or microchannel reactor is a device in which chemical reactions take place in a confinement with typical lateral dimensions below 1 mm; the most typical form of such confinement are microchannels.''Recent advances in synthetic micro reaction technology'' Paul Watts and Charlotte Wiles Chem. Commun., 2007, 443 - 467, Microreactors are studied in the field of micro process engineering, together with other devices (such as micro heat exchangers) in which physical processes occur. The microreactor is usually a continuous flow reactor (contrast with/to a batch reactor). Microreactors offer many advantages over conventional scale reactors, including vast improvements in energy efficiency, reaction speed and yield, safety, reliability, scalability, on-site/on-demand production, and a much finer degree of process control. History Gas-phase microreactors have a long history but those involving liquids started to appear in the late 1990s. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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