NoEnReDsY - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Participation not exactly "voluntary"... (Score 1) 562

by NoEnReDsY on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @04:41PM (#45729611) Attached to: Police Pull Over More Drivers For DNA Tests

If uniformed police officers are pulling you off the road in marked cars with flashing lights, your participation is hardly voluntary.

I was going to say that I think this fine because it is voluntary, however you make a fair point, this is far from voluntary as voluntary participation is normally indicated by the individual placing themselves in the situation, not with the "assistance" of being directed to pulled over. I'm not convinced that they are ill motivated, however there must be a much better way to garner subjects for this research.

Submission + - Using Supercomputers to Find a Bacterial 'Off' Switch (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @04:16PM

Nerval's Lobster writes: The comparatively recent addition of supercomputing to the toolbox of biomedical research may already have paid off in a big way: Researchers have used a bio-specialized supercomputer to identify a molecular “switch” that might be used to turn off bad behavior by pathogens. They’re now trying to figure out what to do with that discovery by running even bigger tests on the world’s second-most-powerful supercomputer. The “switch” is a pair of amino acids called Phe396 that helps control the ability of the E. coli bacteria to move under its own power. Phe396 sits on a chemoreceptor that extends through the cell wall, so it can pass information about changes in the local environment to proteins on the inside of the cell. Its role was discovered by a team of researchers from the University of Tennessee and the ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences using a specialized supercomputer called Anton, which was built specifically to simulate biomolecular interactions among proteins and other molecules to give researchers a better way to study details of how molecules interact. “For decades proteins have been viewed as static molecules, and almost everything we know about them comes from static images, such as those produced with X-ray crystallography,” according to Igor Zhulin, a researcher at ORNL and professor of microbiology at UT, in whose lab the discovery was made. “But signaling is a dynamic process, which is difficult to fully understand using only snapshots.”

Slashdot Top Deals