Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Aquaporin
Aquaporin is a protein that is a water channel in cell membranes. One company with the same name is using the protein in artificial membranes to extract the water. In typical reverse osmosis process, the water is pumped at a high pressure on one side of the membrane and that pushes the relatively free water…
-
Synthetic biology – fungus
The word fungus does not conjure up pleasant memories to most. This has negative implications though mushrooms are a group of mycelial aggregates too. They form an important degradation pathway in nature and are important for recycling much of the heavy plant material. Fungus has not been a major part of producing anything relevant but…
-
Integrative genomics viewer
It is not possible to use simple plotting or charting programs to view the data and draw meaningful conclusions. A dedicated viewer that enables large data sets to be displayed correctly is one of the best options. It is open source with copyrights by Broad and U. CaliforniaIf you are looking at genomics data and…
-
Extensible Open source -omics software
Understanding complex data takes effort. This graphic shows co-morbidites in COVID-19 that was accomplished by a piece of software called Cytoscape The number of open source software that is available is a big list. One of them is Cytoscape. It has ability for wonderful integration of network data from various sources that can be analyzed…
-
Virtual Reality in Biology
Virtual Reality (VR) is moving forward so rapidly that it appears that we will be using that as a primary means for visualizing almost all parameters. The part that is stunning is some of the code that is being developed to enable VR. This uses the existing technology and now uses it in applications where…
-
Enable drug discovery
Drug discovery is hard.Amazing to see the databases that are available for public access that enable drug discovery. Broad institute publishes The Connectivity map (CMAP)which is a database of gene signatures of transcriptional response to perturbation of many cell lines. This is incredible amount of data that is available in the public domain to be…
-
Provivi
Now that is an interesting company. An ability to control pests without killing them. https://provivi.com/en/the-science The company generates a pheromone that confuses the pests so that it cannot find its mate and that way is not able to reproduce. So it eventually dies and does not multiply. The unique thing about the company is the…
-
Product
What is a product by a company. The simplest example is a car that is made by the car company. The product is the car. But as the sales guys teach: their product is transportation. They offer the ability to travel from one place to another and the freedom that comes with it. So that…
-
Small things
Creating a new device is difficult and it involves many steps. It is easy for any company to get overwhelmed into what is required. There is hardware and there is software. There is also so many things to procure, invent and put together. Then there is functionality and operations and logistics. Not easy. One way…
-
L-theanine
It is surprising how much chemistry goes into understanding basic biology. Considering a simple cup of tea. There have been many studies showing the important bioactive compounds in tea. Catechins are polyphenols that got significant attention for their anti-oxidant activities. Then there is caffeine. But another component L-theanine has not been discussed much. L-theanine is…
Got any book recommendations?