Category Archives: computing

When Drops Of Water Flash Green, It Means Socrates Was Mortal

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As an IT professional, my job is about as far away from research computing as you can get. I work for a big oil and gas company, and the apps I build for them are based on solving their particular issues and not on the theoretical or the new-fangled.

The end result is I’m no expert in what is happening in the realm of theoretical computing, but I find it all fascinating. Quantum bits, petaflops… so much interesting stuff!

But I had never heard of a DNA computer before. Holy smokes that is cool. The article I just linked to is actually entitled World’s Smallest Computers Made of DNA and Other Biological Molecules Made to ‘Think’ Logically. And that rather verbose title cleanly sums up the article. They’ve made these little chains of DNA that they can program, and they can get them to answer questions based on logic. It starts easy (IF all men are mortal AND Socrates is a man THEN Socrates is mortal) but then they start, as they say on The Jefferson’s, Movin’ On Up. They even have a compiler to translate from a higher level programming environment down to DNA code.

Tell me that’s not completely bad ass.

Jim

A Life In Code

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As¬†a computer programmer and all-around science geek, this tremendously interests me. I’ve heard about this whole notion of programming bacteria, and the concept definitely intrigued me. In a TED talk I saw by Craig Vetner, I first began to imagine what we could accomplish by doing this. I shared it with friends, almost all of whom said “OMG WHAT IF TEH BACTERIAS MUTATE AN KILL US ALL”, which made me giggle. All technologies have their potential risks, and hopefully the people working with them understand and plan for those risks. But if they don’t, then that’s why we take the time to understand what we’re working with before we release it into the world. Duh.

Well, today on Science Daily, there was a really interesting articleabout some research being done in this area. Essentially, they are finding that things are not quite as easy as we had originally assumed them to be. E. coli cells that the researchers were working with demonstrated a bistability similar to the concept of a toggle switch in electrical engineering. Depending on the state of the bacteria, some would react in one fashion and others in another.

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Ants

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I love it when people think creatively and start modeling things on other things that may or may not be obvious choices. Case in point, I just finished reading an article on Science Daily that details how a group of IT security professionals decided to model a new computer security approach on the ant.

It makes sense. There’s not that many animals in nature more effective at dividing up labor and handling security. Don’t believe me? Step on an ant hill and don’t move your foot. When I was a kid my sister decided that would be a funny thing to get me to do, so I’m two years old shrieking “they’re biting my pee pee!” and running in circles. I love my sister.

The idea is basically more like a monitoring process. Little processes (ants) are released in the environment looking for certain telltale behaviors. When an ant finds something, it releases the digital equivalent of a scent message that attracts other ants. When enough ants agree that there is an issue, the attraction will be strong enough to draw more and more ants. Swarming will trigger a reaction that ultimately alerts the human operators to deal with the problem.

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