pikou - Slashdot User

Mimicking Electric Eel Cells 71

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 05, 2008 @06:23PM from the positively-shocking dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team of US researchers has asked the following question in the new field of systems biology: 'Do we understand how a cell produces electricity well enough to design one, and to optimize that design?' They believe it should be possible to build artificial cells replicating the electrical behavior of electric eel cells. In fact, such artificial cells could deliver better performance — as much as 40% more energy than real eel cells, a computer model suggests. They could be used to power medical implants and other small devices."

Comment Enter Carl Sagan (Score 1) 485

by pikou on Friday September 05, 2008 @03:56AM (#24885195) Attached to: Oldest Skeleton In New World Discovered

I think we should send all those creationists a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. See what they make out of that :)

Submission + - God - hacker or engineer? (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by

dwrugh

on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @01:15AM

dwrugh writes: "With these new tools, [Kurzweil] says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves. This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly. "My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking.""

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