Conorthoughts

Squatting

There is a fine piece by Laurie Penny in the New Statesman about squatting, shelter and the attack on dissent in the UK: http://bit.ly/vEVndT .

How bacteria may power computers

Below is Clive Cookson's article from Saturday's FT (30th October) - he is its science correspondent -and I've ripped off the photo accompanying the article as well which was titled 'Experiments with E. coli could lead to new biological computers' . I don't think the FT will come after me for theft.

A biological computer, in which the basic components are made from bacteria rather than silicon circuitry, has taken a step from science fantasy toward reality at Imperial College London.

Researchers there have built “logic gates”, the basis of digital information processing, from genetically engineered E. coli, the bacteria that populate the human gut. These are the first biological logic gates proven to function like electronic ones.

“Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks in silicon circuitry that our entire digital age is based on,” says Richard Kitney, professor of biomedical systems engineering at Imperial. “Without them, we could not process digital information.

“Now that we have demonstrated that we can replicate these parts using bacteria and DNA, we hope that our work could lead to a new generation of biological processors, whose applications in information processing could be as important as their electronic equivalents,” Kitney says.

The Imperial team suggests that bacterial logic gates could form the building blocks of microscopic biological computers – although these are still many years away.

Possible applications include sensors that swim inside arteries, detecting the build-up of harmful plaque and rapidly delivering medications to the affected zone, and sensors that detect and destroy cancer cells inside the body.

In a paper in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists describe how they transferred two linked regulatory genes from Pseudomonas syringae, a bacterium that infects plants, into E. coli.
Hot to trot

Racehorses adjust their body clocks to new time zones much more quickly than humans – and are less likely to suffer jet lag when flown across the world – according to research at Bristol University.

These genes are activated separately by organic chemicals, such as sugars – and both need to be switched on at the same time to produce a biological response in the bacteria. By appropriate chemical stimulation, the scientists made them respond just like an “AND gate” in a digital circuit. They went on to make a “NOT gate” and, by combining them, the more complex “NAND gate”.

Formidable practical problems remain in deciding how to connect many individual bacterial components together into a working system. As living cells, they cannot be wired together like electronic components. They will probably need to be immobilised by encapsulation in some sort of micro-fluidic device, says Martin Buck, the biology professor on the Imperial team.

“We believe that the next stage of our research could lead to a totally new type of circuitry for processing information,” Buck says. “In the future, we may see complex biological circuitry processing information using chemicals, much in the same way that our body uses them to process and store information.”

Window

What's in a window? What's in a lamp-post? Do you see the window on the right on the top row? Of course you see it! What I mean is 'Could you please look at the window on the right on the top row?'. Now, do you notice anything unusual about it? Does anything distinguish it from the windows to its left, or from those underneath? Responses please on a card to ... No, respones please here!

 

                                                                        (To be continued, hopefully) 

Wanted: a plan to save Europe

 

"From the recent conversations I have had with European ministers and officials," [on the future of the Euro and the Eurozone] "the passenger on the Berlin U-Bahn or Athens Metro is just as likely to be right as the multitude of pundits and experts."

Philip Stephens, Chief Political Correspondent, Financial Times, Thursday 22 September 2011 (The photo is my - CJ's - addition. I was unable to steal Ingram Pimm's wonderful cartoon illustrating Mr. Stephen's article. Apologies, Mr. Pimm!)

Darkness

Darkness. The view from my desk or rather from my brain. They say to see it as clouds, as passing clouds. But no clouds can be seen through the window. However, when I stand up and go to the window, I can see some. Success. This is a passing cloud, if a long one that is moving slowly.

 

My young nephew

His name is Gabriele. The disgracefully unshaven man behind him is his father Michael, also my brother. (How Sofia puts up with such a hedgehog in her bed is beyond me.) Behind to the left is no, not Matteo - I thought at first it was him playing with a Rubix cube - but his brother - and Gabriele's - Michele with two pieces of lego.  

 

On the look-out

 

Am I so demoralised now that I cannot look for a partner? Am I so demoralised that I can no longer write so much as a sentence, no longer believing that writing can help get me going, fire a cylinder? No, I am not quite that bad, and the proof is that I had a look out the front door on Lupus Street this morning. I didn't see anyone who struck me as suitable, but I did look. Also the Muse of writing (who is the Muse of writing?) has not let me down entirely either: I woke early and she whispered "Write this!".

Weekend in Worcestershire

 

 

Having shaven, I went walking around Broadway, in the northern Cotswolds, for a day and a half. Hirsute hedgerows, bearded houses, not all clean Cotswold lines. The sun shone.  

My new friend Dieter

 

I exaggerate, I lie but it is like finding a friend.

"Wer die eigene Arbeit als die Quintessenz des von Kant, gar des von Parmenides begonnenen Denkens sieht, mag leider die Lebenssituationen von sich abschneiden, aus denen er zu dem wurde, als der er sich nun versteht. Die unendliche Macht des Begriffs bringt seine Wahrheit aus beliebigen, somit gleichgültigen Bedingungen des besonderen Individuums hervor, das ihn zuerst in seiner vollen Bestimmtheit ausspricht, – so ist gut hegelisch ein philosophischer Grund für das Vergessen zu formulieren."

Form Dieter Henrich Hegel im Kontext, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010 (first published Frankfurt am Main in 1971, 2nd edition 1988), p. 10.

Translation on request

 
 

The value of work

"Wer aus dem sausenden Umschwung des Arbeitsprozesses herausfällt, fällt aus der Welt. Ebensowenig wie der nackte Heilige, der das ungeheure Rad dreht, darf man sich beim Arbeitsprozess fragen: Wozu das Ganze?"

From Wackenroder's story 'Ein wunderbares Morgenländisches Märchen von einem nackten Heiligen' quoted by Rüdiger Safranski (photo above) in his Romantik Eine deutsche Affäre (Carl Hanser Verlag, München, 2007), p. 206.

Translation on request