From the monthly archives:

April 2010

Liveblogging Globe Forum 2010, Stockholm

April 29, 2010

A bit of liveblogging, at least. I’m in Stockholm for the Globe Forum 2010, resting for a moment after a talk and interviews. The Forum brings together people building businesses focused on sustainability. Work ranges from computational fluid dynamics for better wind energy to a technology that lays down nanoscale films of a tungsten disulphide [...]

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Peptoid nanosheets:
A platform for new nanotechnologies

April 22, 2010

Fresh from Ron Zuckerman’s lab at the Molecular Foundry: a new kind of molecular membrane — thin and crystalline — made by self-assembly of peptoid oligomers. As I discussed in an earlier post, peptoids have remarkable potential as building blocks for self-assembled nanosystems. Peptoids are peptide-like structures, but with monomers that can be chosen from [...]

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Zinc fingers for gripping DNA

April 16, 2010

Zinc finger technology has great promise in genetic engineering and therapeutics, with potential applications in structural DNA nanotechnology, too.
Zinc finger proteins (ZFPs) are often called “game changing” because of the unprecedented way they precisely modify genes. Excitement about them is mirrored in the number of related scientific publications, which have climbed from hardly any 20 [...]

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Incentive engineering v. Econ 101
   (creativity, criminality, etc.)

April 7, 2010

About a book and a paper…
The economics I encountered (in what were considered to be humanities courses) at MIT presented theories of productive behavior illustrated with graphs of relationships between supply and demand, prices, utilities, consumer surpluses, deadweight losses, and so on. These are elementary parts of the apparatus of neoclassical economics, a soaring [...]

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