
The dynamics of a spinning chair

Is there life in your PC?

How do we keep things from deteriorating?
Norman Billingham talks to Jonathan Hare about the science and ethics of preservation and conservation.
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How I am inspired by science

Fixated on Nitrogen
Sussex University has always supported unusual, interdisciplinary and innovative faculties. A good example of this was the Nitrogen Fixation Centre. Jeff Leigh was part of this exceptional work who's aim was to discover how nature uses nitrogen to cr....
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Buckyball Workshop with Harry Kroto with balanced Buckyballs
Children's Buckyball Workshop in San Luis Potosi Mexico with Harry Kroto organised by Humberto and Mauricio Terrones. This group started a trend balancing Buckyballs on their heads. I hope the music background is acceptable as no one is making money ....
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Ideas Come from Many Places
Come share with me the memories of where ideas have come from during my life - from childhood to old age. You may find it helpful in encouraging your own brains to come up with new ideas. They won't all be useful - as I have found in this case of min....
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The Discovery of Helicobacter
Before the 1970s, well fixed specimens of gastric mucosa were rare. Then the flexible endoscope was introduced. This enabled gastroenterologists to take numerous well-fixed small biopsies from the stomach. Gastric histology and pathology were clearly....
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Telomeres: Telling Tails
Telomeres protect chromosome ends and help stabilize the genome. Throughout human life and in aging, telomeres often erode down, eventually causing cells to malfunction or die. The highly regulated cellular enzyme telomerase adds telomeric DNA to tel....
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The Killer Defence
Immune surveillance by virus-specific CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), or killer T cells, has long been known to be central to the control of acute infections and some cancers, though the role of CTL memory in the rapid recall of immune protectio....
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Minimizing a Bacterial Genome by Global Design and Synthesis
In 2010, we chemically synthesized the 1078 Kb Mycoplasma mycoides genome and transplanted it into a recipient cell cytoplasm to create a 'synthetic cell', JCVI-syn1.0 (Science, 329, 52-56, 2010). We identified several hundred non-essential genes by ....
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Role of Nitric Oxide and Cyclic GMP in Cell Signaling and Drug Development
Nitric oxide research has grown rapidly with about 150,000 research publications describing its biological effects. It is an important messenger molecule that affects most tissues and biological processes. Many effects of nitric oxide are mediated by....
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Ion Channels: Their Discovery, their Function and their Role in Diseases
The concept of bioelectricity emerged in the late 18th century, based on the experiments of Galvani and Volta. Sixty years ago, Hodgkin and Huxley showed that the nerve impulse is a result of permeability changes of the nerve membrane. This raised th....
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The Origins of Cellular Life
The complexity of modern biological life has long made it difficult to understand how life could emerge spontaneously from the chemistry of the early earth. We are attempting to synthesize simple artificial cells in order to discover plausible pathwa....
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The Origin of Reversible Protein Phosphorylation as a Regulatory Mechanism
Reversible protein phosphorylation can be considered one of the most prevalent mechanism by which eukaryotic cellular events are regulated. It is directly involved in numerous pathological conditions, and bacterial and viral diseases. This process wa....
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The Adventure of Cold Atoms. From Optical Pumping to Quantum Gases
Conservation laws are very important in quantum physics. Two examples of applications will be given. First, optical pumping which uses transfer of angular momentum from polarized photons to atoms to produce highly polarized atomic gases. Then, laser ....
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A Crime against Humanity
When Monsanto first tried to introduce GMO seeds into Europe there was a backlash by the Green parties and their political allies, who feared that American agro-business was about to take over their food supply. Thus began a massive campaign not agai....
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Finding Mutations that Affect Immunity
Beginning with an exception to normal function caused by a genetic aberration, one may hope to find at least one protein with non-redundant function in a certain biological process. This approach permitted the identification of the receptor for bacte....
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Insight into the Laws of Nature for Biological Evolution
Both evolutionary biology and genetics have their roots 150 years ago in work with phenotypic variants of plants and animals. In contrast, microbial genetics originating as recently as the 1940s, rapidly revealed that filamentous DNA molecules are th....
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From Proto-oncogenes to Precision Oncology
The diagnosis, classification, and treatment of human cancers are being transformed by scientific discoveries that were strongly influenced by the discovery of the c-src proto-oncogene, as described in the lecture by Michael Bishop. The path to this ....
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The State of the Universe
Our Universe was created in 'The Big Bang' and has been expanding ever since. Brian Schmidt describe the vital statistics of the Universe, including its size, weight, shape, age, and composition. He also tries to make sense of the Universe's past, pr....
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A New Kilogram in 2018: The Biggest Revolution in Metrology Since the French Revolution
Metrology - the science of measurements - is responsible for the international uniformity and precision in standards. Today, the seven units for meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela of our international system of units (SI units....
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What About Redefining Time Using a Stable Laser?
Several laser-based Atomic Clocks now have an accuracy potential of ~2 x10-18, a hundred-fold better than the best achieved after more than 60 years' experience with rf resonances in Cs atoms. Still, this long attention span documents that the Cs Fou....
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Global Warming Revisited
Because of the following statement from the American Physical Society: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, s....
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Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and its Role in Cosmology
In the first half of the 20th century other galaxies were recognized, their red shift measured and theories of the whole universe were developed. They included Big Bang and Steady State. Arno Penzias and I found the Cosmic Microwave Radiation (CMB) i....
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The Future of Particle Physics
Elementary Particle Physics seeks to discover the basic constituents of matter and understand the fundamental forces that act on them. In this lecture I shall review the current state of particle physics, the grand success of the ñstandard modelî, ....
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A Random Walk in Science
I will discuss my random walk in science, from my graduate student on postdoctoral years testing the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory of electro-weak forces, and then to energy transfer in condensed matter systems, the spectroscopy of positronium, laser....
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Gamma Ray Bursts: Windows on the Universe
Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe. They happen about once per day in the visible universe. Their fantastic engines pump out as much energy in a matter of seconds as all the stars in a galaxy do in a billion years. This....
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Discovery of the Higgs Particle
Recently the Higgs particle has been discovered at CERN. This particle was theoretically predicted. The historical development of field theory, leading to this prediction will be discussed.
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Future Accelerators for Astro-Particle Physics
One of the most remarkable results of astro-particle Physics has been the success of the Standard Model, recently culminated in the discovery of the Higgs particle (Ho). However, the Ho is observable only in few channels at the LHC, in the presence o....
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The International Year of Light: Celebrating Fifty Years of Laser Revolution in Physics
The year 2015 has been named the International Year of Light, to mark milestones in the science of light which occurred 1000, 200, 150, 100 and 50 years go. I was a young student in physics in 1965, when the cosmic radiation background was discovered....
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Light Quanta and Their Idiosyncrasies
Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (now 150 years old) seemed in its comprehensive way to be capable of answering all of the questions one might ever pose about the theory of light. But that spell was broken in 1900 by Planck's discovery that light bea....
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Quantum Information: a Scientific and Technological Revolution for the 21st Century
Two of the great scientific and technical revolutions of the 20th century were the discovery of the quantum nature of the submicroscopic world, and the advent of information science and engineering. Both of these have had a profound effect not only o....
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Science with Combs of Light
The spectrum of a frequency comb, commonly generated by a mode-locked femtosecond laser, consists of several hundred thousand precisely evenly spaced spectral lines. Such laser frequency combs have revolutionized the art of measuring the frequency of....
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What We Learn When We Learn that the Universe is Accelerating
The 1998 discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating was not only unexpected, but it also led to the postulation of a previously-unknown 'dark energy' forming almost three-quarters of the "stuff" of the universe. How was this discovery ma....
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The Origin of Elementary Particle Masses
In the beginning of the 60s, the laws of classical general relativity, Einstein's generalisation of Newtonian gravity, and of quantum electrodynamics, the quantum version of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, were known. These laws describe long range....
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Coordination Polymers 1. Introducing: Coordination Polymers
Coordination polymers are a fantastically diverse class of molecular materials. Here we look at a few examples of their unique structures and properties.
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Coordination Polymers 2. How to Make a Coordination Polymer
Making a coordination polymer is a complicated process with many potential variables. Here we look at the advantages of a few different synthesis methods.
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Coordination Polymers 3. Studying Coordination Polymer Formation
Exploiting the unique properties of coordination polymers requires full understanding of their formation. Here we look at how in-situ x-ray diffraction helps to uncover some of the details.
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Self-assembled nanoparticles using a mixture of temperature responsive copolymers
Temperature responsive polymer is an interesting material that shows reversible hydration/dehydration behavior in water at 32C, termed as the lower critical solution temperature (LCST). In this video, temperature responsive block copolymers are focus....
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Self-Made 3D Scanner

askFSU 2- Rob Mueller at NASA Swampworks
Rob Mueller, Lead Senior Technologist at NASA Swampworks answers some questions about his project to 3D print on Mars and other space objects! Interview by Philip Schlenoff at GEOSET Studios before the Stacking Layers II conference http:/stackinglaye....
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askFSU 1 : speed of light, tachyons, solar sails, and black holes
Joining Philip Schlenoff is Dr. Jeff Owens, from the Physics department at Florida State University, to answer some physics and astrophysics-related questions!
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Our youngest scientist

Nanoscopy – allowing molecules to be examined inside living cells
Eric Betzig shared the 2014 Chemistry Nobel prize with fellow American William E. Moerner and Romanian-German Stefan W. Hell for revolutionising science through the development of super-resolved fluorescence to exceed the accepted limits of tradition....
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The Hunt May Be Up for the Carrier of the Diffuse Interstellar Bands and other stories
The development of radio telescopes has revolutionized our understanding of the molecular constitution of the interstellar medium ISM. A recent surprise that the element carbon had up its sleeve was the existence of C60, Buckminsterfullerene, the thi....
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Fun with Light and Single Molecules
More than 25 years ago, single molecules were first detected optically, but how do we really detect a single molecule today, and what good is it? It is an amazing fact that you can even detect single molecules with your own eyes. When a new regime of....
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Tickling Worms – Surprises from Basic Research
Research, at least my research, has never been linear. I have found that my lab and I often double back on problems after years of inactivity or go off in entirely new directions as dictated by the work and people's interests This lack of direction r....
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