I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that’s a tree”, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein , On Certainty

Archive for May, 2008

Biological Function and Anticipatory Systems

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

From ScienceNOW Daily News, this story, entitled “Pavlov’s Bacteria?”[1]:

Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their environment, such as acidity fluctuations, by altering their internal workings. If the changes are regular enough, bacteria can respond ahead of time. But systems biologist Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University wondered if microbes were […]

Filed under: Anticipatory Systems, Entailment, Relational Biology | No Comments »

Can Protein Folding be p0wned?

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Are you a l33t gamer? Can you r0x0r the tertiary structure? If so, you might be interested in FoldIt, a new “online” game which essentially strives to create a chimera of computer program and human to solve tertiary structure problems in novel proteins. As described at MIT Technology Review today:

For years, biochemists have reengineered naturally occurring […]

Filed under: Synthetic Biology | No Comments »