Nagoya University researchers have developed a light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off. The team used tiny triggered tweezers made of DNA to open and close in response to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. “We are designing DNA nano-robotics that are mechanically operated by light rather than chemical fuel,” says Nagoya researcher Hiroyuki Asanuma. The researchers focused on a loop of DNA that looks like a hairpin with two arms. At the end of each arm, azobenzene groups are integrated into the DNA sequence. Under visible light, the azobenzene groups adopt the trans isomer, allowing the base pairs to join together. When UV light is applied, the azobenzene groups switch to the more sterically-constrained cis isomer. The system is fully reversible, allowing it to have great potential to be applied to other nanotechnologies that use DNA. “To be able to switch biomolecular conformational changes is of considerable interest for many applications in biomedicine and bionanotechnology,” says Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Simmel.
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The fusion of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data (HPD) could potentially result in the generation of robust systems that are at least one order of magnitude faster than anything the HPC community currently uses for certain applications, says San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) interim director Michael Norman. Last November, SDSC announced plans to construct Gordon, a data-intensive supercomputer that is expected to read latency-bound files at 10 times the speed and efficiency of current HPC systems with the help of flash memory solid state drives. Ultimately, Gordon will possess 245 teraflops of total compute power, 64 TB of digital random access memory, and 256 TB of flash memory. Gordon also will assist in the integration of HPC and HPD because it is designed for data-intensive predictive science as well as data-mining applications.
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Researchers working on the European Union-funded PERPLEXUS project have developed a computing platform inspired by biological systems in which a self-configuring wireless network connects several modules to enable them to operate as a coherent group. PERPLEXUS is based on the ubidule, a purpose-designed module that can take information from the environment, share data wirelessly, and adapt its behavior to different circumstances. In large networks, ubidules can evolve to specialize in a certain task, which other ubidules then delegate to them. The researchers say that ubidules can model grid-based problems in the physical sciences, as well as more challenging biological and social sciences problems. Another branch of the PERPLEXUS project involved a fleet of all-terrain robots equipped with ubichips. The researchers developed a strategy known as collective robotics, in which groups of robots communicate with one another to perform a task and are more effective than the same robots acting individually.
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