News archive

  • Grunost

    Byscientist

    Grunost is a type of cheese that is sweet and often typical of Norways’ cheese culture. It is incidentally not a cheese at all since it is made from the process of making cheese that leaves whey as a by product. This whey is boiled with milk or cream to make a brown caramelized cheese….

  • Capsaicin

    Byscientist

    Capsaicin is the flavoring and key ingredient for the heat in chili peppers. The heat comes from its interaction with TRPV1 (vanilloid receptor subtype 1) ion channel that leads to the burning sensation in any animal tissue that comes into contact with it. Interestingly, bird TRPV1 is not responsive to capsaicin. Another function that has…

  • Garlic crush and sit rule

    Byscientist

    More about garlic preparation. Garlin contains alliin stored in the cytoplasm which is converted by enzyme allinase, which is in the cell sap, to allicin which is the key sulfur compound responsible for its flavor and all the health benefits. However to make the enzyme react, the crushing process needs to take place at room…

  • Explainable AI

    Byscientist

    A very traditional problem solving method is the following: given a set of features or variables, can we understand the features to form a conclusion. This could be something like a treatment strategy wherein the strategy is built on a series of data and then ingesting the data helps make a conclusion. However, an equally…

  • Biotech clusters

    Byscientist

    Biotech cluster in Boston/Cambridge Kendall square has become a hub of new Biotech companies. The one developer that has had a major role to play has been David Clem who’s effort has been documented by Robin Wolfe Scheffler – a MIT historian and author of David Clem: Building Genetown. This model is not easy to…

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    TDP43

    Byscientist

    TDP43 (a nuclear DNA-RNA binding protein) is involved in splicing, RNA transport and stability in neurons. It was first identified as a pyrimidine rich TAR DNA sequence in HIV type 1 gene to modulate HIV gene expression. In 95% of the ALS patients, TDP43 is abnormal located within the cell and may also be aggregated,…

  • LoRa adaptors

    Byscientist

    LoRa in the IOT community are the low power long range wireless standards devices that are utilized to send a signal over large distances. However, in the AI field LoRa implies Low rank adaptation – which is relatively more efficient compute way to fine tune pretrained models (LLM, vision transformers, diffusion models). With a pretrained…

  • Flow

    Byscientist

    The father of focus was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi an American Hungarian psychiatrist who associated focus with happiness. His contention was that true happiness comes from doing things in flow. Flow was designed as something that had enough challenge that makes it exciting while at the same time not being boring. For example, passive activities such as…

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    Heart rate variability

    Byscientist

    By definition, heart rate variability is the time between each heart beat. This is called the R-R interval and shows the beat modulation of the sino-atrial node whose time variation is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. This matters because sympathetic (fight or flight) or parasympathetic (rest and digest) activity governs cardiac dynamics. A higher…