Today I Learned:
1) How a photonic crystal works, at least in the barest sense. A photonic crystal is a form of photonic resonator, which is a thing-that-keeps-light-trapped-in-it. Specifically, a photonic crystal is a very thin sheet of glass or some other material with very carefully-spaced holes in it. The sheet is made of a material and thickness that keep the light bouncing around inside it in the z-axis, exactly the same way a fiber optic cable keeps light bouncing around inside itself. The holes act to reflect light of a specific wavelength in a similar way, keeping it contained in the center of the pattern. For information on how to use DNA origami to *very* specifically place fluorophores inside photonic crystals, see http://ift.tt/1D9vchU.
2) One of the major problems with current DNA walkers is that they tend to fall off of their surfaces. (DNA walkers are little robots made of DNA that can “walk” along a track of pre-arranged DNA strands, much the same way myosin can walk down actin filaments). Another is that it’s hard to make the tracks all come out on the same side of whatever surface they’re on, so a few percent of the time a walker will just run into a gap where there’s supposed to be a thing to grab.
3) …about monads and applicators and some of the ugly yet elegant workings deep inside Haskell. It turns out that behind virtually all of the comforting-looking bits of haskell — things like *functions* and *lists* and *list comprehensions* — are teeming hordes of functional constructs, quietly keeping everything running under the hood. This is not the forum to discuss the details, at least not until I understand those hordes well enough to explain them to a six-year-old.
No comments:
Post a Comment