The icosahedron is the largest of the Platonic solids, and icosahedral protein structures are widely used in biological systems for packaging and transport. There has been considerable interest in repurposing such structures for applications ranging from targeted delivery to multivalent immunogen presentation. The ability to design proteins that self-assemble into precisely specified, highly ordered icosahedral structures would open the door to a new generation...
Tag Archives: design
Design of a hyperstable 60-subunit protein icosahedron
The icosahedron is the largest of the Platonic solids, and icosahedral protein structures are widely used in biological systems for packaging and transport. There has been considerable interest in repurposing such structures for applications ranging from targeted delivery to multivalent immunogen presentation. The ability to design proteins that self-assemble into precisely specified, highly ordered icosahedral structures would open the door to a new generation...
ARM’s newest CPU design wants to make throttling a thing of the past
Many companies, Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm included, like to rely on their own custom ARM CPU architectures for their chips, but the CPUs and GPUs that ARM itself designs for other companies to use are still important. They let commodity chipmakers like MediaTek and Rockchip offer chips with good performance for less money, and they serve as a sort of pace car for the...
Polar metals by geometric design
Gauss’s law dictates that the net electric field inside a conductor in electrostatic equilibrium is zero by effective charge screening; free carriers within a metal eliminate internal dipoles that may arise owing to asymmetric charge distributions. Quantum physics supports this view, demonstrating that delocalized electrons make a static macroscopic polarization, an ill-defined quantity in metals—it is exceedingly unusual to find a polar metal that exhibits...
Polar metals by geometric design
Gauss’s law dictates that the net electric field inside a conductor in electrostatic equilibrium is zero by effective charge screening; free carriers within a metal eliminate internal dipoles that may arise owing to asymmetric charge distributions. Quantum physics supports this view, demonstrating that delocalized electrons make a static macroscopic polarization, an ill-defined quantity in metals—it is exceedingly unusual to find a polar metal that exhibits...
Microrobotics: Swimmers by design
Scientists have created soft microrobots whose body shapes can be controlled by structured light, and which self-propel by means of travelling-wave body deformations similar to those exhibited by swimming protozoa.
Nature 531 312 doi: 10.1038/531312a
GeekWire Deals: Make your app a hit with this discounted design course
Bad design can ruin an app. It might make sense to you to put buttons along the left side of your app, but users can get lost if you don’t follow some tried and true design techniques. With today’s GeekWire Deals offer, you can learn...
Startup Spotlight: BeFunky makes online photo editing and graphic design simple
Today, almost everyone has a smartphone — which means almost everyone is an amateur photographer. But that wasn’t the case in 2007, when Portland natives Tekin Tatar and Kemal Ozisikcilar founded photo editing tool BeFunky. Still, they anticipated the increasing...
Boeing engineers prove you don’t have to golf to design a better golf club
EVERETT, Wash. – When experts at Callaway Golf sought Boeing’s help to improve their golf clubs’ aerodynamics, Boeing turned to a special breed of engineers: recent hires with a hunger for projects off Boeing’s beaten path. Some of the engineers didn’t even...
Searching for logo news? Bing tweaks design for third time in six years
An Internet search on the evolution of the Bing logo returned some fresh hits Thursday as tweaks were made at the 6-year-old Microsoft product. It’s the third variation of the logo, which was last updated in September...
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