Charles Daney

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Many trace the origins of nanomedicine to a talk Richard Feynman gave at Caltech in 1959—There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. During the lecture, Feynman proposed the idea of chemical manipulation at the atomic level and suggested that patients might one day “swallow the surgeon” in the form of tiny machines. Some 50 years later, researchers are still working to realize these dreams, but Feynman would no doubt be impressed by the list of nanomedicine applications being developed today. Nanomaterials have made their way into drug-delivery systems and diagnostics, and are quickly becoming essential basic research tools. Tags: nanotechnology nanobiotechnology - Charles Daney

A journalist once asked the behavioral psychologist Donald Hebb whether a person’s genes or environment mattered most to the development of personality. Hebb replied that the question was akin to asking which feature of a rectangle—length or width—made the most important contribution to its area. ... When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, the hope was that all such questions would be answered. In the intervening decade, it has become apparent that there are many more questions than before. Tags: genetics behavior - Charles Daney

The Atacama large milllimetre/submillimetre array (Alma) in Chile is the largest, most complex telescope ever built. Alma's purpose is to study processes occurring a few hundred million years after the formation of the Universe when the first stars began to shine. Its work should help explain why the cosmos looks the way it does today. Tags: astronomy - Charles Daney

Work in the past few months has highlighted several potential roadblocks. Reprogramming can be inefficient and induce mutations; the reprogrammed cells cannot develop into some cell types; and those they can generate are not always a good model for disease. New issues are emerging apace: work published last week shows that, in a particular strain of mice, iPS cells cause immune reactions when they are transplanted. Tags: stem cells - Charles Daney

Discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world. Known or suspected examples range from the ability of birds to navigate using Earth's magnetic field to the inner workings of photosynthesis — the process by which plants and bacteria turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into organic matter, and arguably the most important biochemical reaction on Earth. Tags: biology quantum mechanics - Charles Daney

How did we acquire our beautiful brains? How did the savage struggle for survival produce such an extraordinary object? This is a difficult question to answer, not least because brains do not fossilise. Thanks to the latest technologies, though, we can now trace the brain's evolution in unprecedented detail, from a time before the very first nerve cells right up to the age of cave art and cubism. Tags: neuroscience evolution - Charles Daney

Far from being humble messengers, RNAs of all shapes and sizes are now seen to be powerful players in how genomes operate. In fact, gene regulation has turned out to be a surprisingly complex process governed by various types of regulatory DNA, which may lie deep in the wilderness of supposed “junk.” Far from being humble messengers, RNAs of all shapes and sizes are actually powerful players in how genomes operate. Tags: rna gene regulation - Charles Daney

Planet hunters have found extrasolar planets by watching for the subtle wobble in a star's position as a planet's gravity tugs it back and forth. They've noted the almost imperceptible dimming of a star's light as a planet passes between it and Earth. They've seen a distant star twinkle, first brightly and then faintly, as a nearer star, and then its planet drift by. But a new way to find planets may be the most ingenious yet. Tags: extrasolar planets - Charles Daney

Two of the strangest ideas in modern physics - that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens, and the notion that our universe is part of a larger multiverse - have been unified into a single theory. This solves a bizarre but fundamental problem in cosmology and has set physics circles buzzing with excitement, as well as some bewilderment. Tags: cosmology quantum theory multiverse - Charles Daney

It's been nearly 25 years since the European Muon Collaboration made a startling discovery: only a portion of a proton’s spin comes from the quarks that make up the proton. Thee revelation was a bit of a shock for physicists who had believed that the spin of a proton could be calculated simply by adding the spin states of the three constituent quarks. This is often described as the "proton spin crisis." Tags: particle physics - Charles Daney

Physicists have always thought quantum computing is hard because quantum states are incredibly fragile. But could noise and messiness actually help things along? Tags: quantum computing - Charles Daney

Black holes by their nature are difficult to observe, so the evidence for their existence is by necessity indirect. A good functional definition is as follows: a black hole is a compact object whose gravitational influence is so strong that anything coming too close cannot escape. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there will be a boundary called the event horizon which separates the “interior” of the black hole from the rest of space. Tags: black holes - Charles Daney

The gluon is what’s called a “vector boson,” meaning it has spin 1 (in units of planck’s fundamental constant, ℏ). And it is the mediator of the strong nuclear force. The force which is responsible for binding quarks into hadrons and keeping atomic nuclei together. When I say the gluon is a mediator, I mean that when a quark interacts with another quark or anti-quark, it does so by exchanging gluons with the other quark/anti-quark. In fact gluons themselves interact with other gluons by exchanging gluons. Tags: particle physics - Charles Daney

Little attention has been given to how limb symmetry is achieved, even though much is known about how bones themselves grow. Limb structures are specified in the embryo and then grow for some 16 years. We do not even know why they finally stop growing or why their growth rate varies at different ages. Arm length matches with extraordinary accuracy, varying by no more than about 2%. Yet much about how this finely tuned growth is controlled remains a mystery. Tags: biology developmental biology - Charles Daney

Mitochondria, not studied in earnest until the 1970s, are now the subject of intense scrutiny for their potentially central role in common, complex diseases. They may be, scientists say, pivotal to the etiology of diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, epidemics against which researchers and companies have spent billions of dollars but made arguably little progress. Tags: mitochondria - Charles Daney

BOSS is the first attempt to use baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) as a precision tool to measure dark energy. Baryon oscillation refers to how matter clumps in a regular way throughout the universe, a physical manifestation of the expansion of the universe. Until now, 3-D maps showing this oscillation have been based on the distribution of visible galaxies. BOSS is the first survey to map intergalactic hydrogen gas as well, using distant quasars. Tags: dark energy cosmology - Charles Daney

My goal is to explain the sense in which the Standard Model is “chiral” and what that means. In order to do this, we’ll first learn about a related idea, helicity, which is related to a particle’s spin. We’ll then use this as an intuitive step to understanding the more abstract notion of chirality, and then see how masses affect chiral theories and what this all has to do with the Higgs. Tags: particle physics Higgs boson - Charles Daney