Tag Archives: University of Washington

Memory chips could get organic and a nod to singer, Dean Martin

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Researchers from the University of Washington (located in Washington state) and Southeast University (China) have found a way to create organic ferroelectric molecules which offer the possibility of flexible, nontoxic memory chips according a Jan. 24, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

At the heart of computing are tiny crystals that transmit and store digital information’s ones and zeroes. Today these are hard and brittle materials. But cheap, flexible, nontoxic organic molecules may play a role in the future of hardware.

A team led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Southeast University in China discovered a molecule [diisopropylammonium bromide?] that shows promise as an organic alternative to today’s silicon-based semiconductors. The findings, published this week in the journal Science, display properties that make it well suited to a wide range of applications in memory, sensing and low-cost energy storage.

“This molecule is quite remarkable, with some of the key properties that are comparable with the most popular inorganic crystals,” said co-corresponding author Jiangyu Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering.

The Jan. 24, 2013 University of Washington news release by Hannah Hickey, which originated the news item, details the advantages of these crystals while noting they are not likely to replace currently used ferroelectric materials as the new molecule is not suitable for all uses (Note: Links have been removed),

The carbon-based material could offer even cheaper ways to store digital information; provide a flexible, nontoxic material for medical sensors that would be implanted in the body; and create a less costly, lighter material to harvest energy from natural vibrations.

The new molecule is a ferroelectric, meaning it is positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other, where the direction can be flipped by applying an electrical field. Synthetic ferroelectrics are now used in some displays, sensors and memory chips.

In the study the authors pitted their molecule against barium titanate, a long-known ferroelectric material that is a standard for performance. Barium titanate is a ceramic crystal and contains titanium; it has largely been replaced in industrial applications by better-performing but lead-containing alternatives.

The new molecule holds its own against the standard-bearer. It has a natural polarization, a measure of how strongly the molecules align to store information, of 23, compared to 26 for barium titanate. To Li’s knowledge this is the best organic ferroelectric discovered to date.

A recent study in Nature announced an organic ferroelectric that works at room temperature. By contrast, this molecule retains its properties up to 153 degrees Celsius (307 degrees F), even higher than for barium titanate.

The new molecule also offers a full bag of electric tricks. Its dielectric constant – a measure of how well it can store energy – is more than 10 times higher than for other organic ferroelectrics. And it’s also a good piezoelectric, meaning it’s efficient at converting movement into electricity, which is useful in sensors.

The new molecule is made from bromine, a natural element isolated from sea salt, mixed with carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen (its full name is diisopropylammonium bromide). Researchers dissolved the elements in water and evaporated the liquid to grow the crystal. Because the molecule contains carbon, it is organic, and pivoting chemical bonds allow it to flex.

The molecule would not replace current inorganic materials, Li said, but it could be used in applications where cost, ease of manufacturing, weight, flexibility and toxicity are important.

Here’s a citation and link to the paper,

Diisopropylammonium Bromide Is a High-Temperature Molecular Ferroelectric Crystal by Da-Wei Fu, Hong-Ling Ci, Yuanming Liu, Qiong Ye, Wen Zhang, Yi Zhang, Xue-Yuan Chen, Gianluca Giovannetti, Massimo Capone, Jiangyu Li, Ren-Gen Xiong. Science 25 January 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6118 pp. 425-428. DOI: 10.1126/science.1229675

This paper, along with a few others about ferroelectric materials in the Jan. 2013 issue of Science, is behind a paywall. Given the title of the paper, I’ve made the assumption that the new molecule is diisopropylammonium bromide.

At any rate, all of this has led me to an old song by singer, Dean Martin, titled ‘Memories are made of this,’

I found this piece of information in the comments,

 neuro518 3 weeks ago

the guitarist is Terry Gilkyson and his group here is called the Easy Riders. He wrote this song and hundreds of others including “Fast Freight” performed by the Kingston Trio. He was in at the very beginning of the transition of American music from pop to folk and was one of the best. For some reason he never gets much credit, but he was one of the best.

Happy Friday, Jan. 25, 2013.

Are we and our world a computer simulation?

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There is a fascinating Dec. 10, 2012 news item on Nanowerk about a philosophical question that’s being researched by a team of physicists at the University of Washington (Note: I have removed a link),

The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly (“Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?“) by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:

The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.

Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.

We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

He also held that “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

Here’s what the University of Washington physicists, from the Dec. 10, 2012 University of Washington news release by Vincent Stricherz, which originated the news item,

With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But the UW team has suggested tests that can be performed now, or in the near future, that are sensitive to constraints imposed on future simulations by limited resources.

Currently, supercomputers using a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics and starting from the fundamental physical laws that govern the universe can simulate only a very small portion of the universe, on the scale of one 100-trillionth of a meter, a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, said Martin Savage, a UW physics professor.

…

However, Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.

The supercomputers performing lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations essentially divide space-time into a four-dimensional grid. That allows researchers to examine what is called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature and the one that binds subatomic particles called quarks and gluons together into neutrons and protons at the core of atoms.

“If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge,” Savage said. Then it would be a matter of looking for a “signature” in our universe that has an analog in the current small-scale simulations.

Savage and colleagues Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire, who collaborated while at the UW’s Institute for Nuclear Theory, and Zohreh Davoudi, a UW physics graduate student, suggest that the signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.

In a paper they have posted on arXiv, an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.

“This is the first testable signature of such an idea,” Savage said.

If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

“Then the question is, ‘Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?’” she said. [emphasis mine]

Here’s the citation for and a link to the arXiv.org paper by Beane, Davoudi, and Savage,

Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation by Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, Martin J. Savage (Submitted on 4 Oct 2012 (v1), last revised 9 Nov 2012 (this version, v2))

Fascinating, yes?

Contraception and HIV protection in cloth*

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Researchers at the University of Washington have published a study in the peer-reviewed, open access journal, Public Library of Science ONE (PLoS ONE), concerning their work to produce fibres that can deliver both contraceptives and anti-HIV drugs, according to a Nov. 30, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

The only way to protect against HIV and unintended pregnancy today is the condom. It’s an effective technology, but not appropriate or popular in all situations.

A University of Washington team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection.

Hannah Hickey’s  Nov. 30, 2012 University of Washington news release, which originated the news item, provides details,

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author Kim Woodrow, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

Electrospinning uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets or pills. No high temperatures are involved, so the method is suitable for heat-sensitive molecules. The fabric can also incorporate large molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods.

…

They first dissolved polymers approved by the Food and Drug Administration and antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV to create a gooey solution that passes through a syringe. As the stream encounters the electric field it stretches to create thin fibers measuring 100 to several thousand nanometers that whip through the air and eventually stick to a collecting plate (one nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch). The final material is a stretchy fabric that can physically block sperm or release chemical contraceptives and antivirals.

“This method allows controlled release of multiple compounds,” Ball said. “We were able to tune the fibers to have different release properties.”

One of the fabrics they made dissolves within minutes, potentially offering users immediate, discrete protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Another dissolves gradually over a few days, providing an option for sustained delivery, more like the birth-control pill,  to provide contraception and guard against HIV.

The fabric could incorporate many fibers to guard against many different sexually transmitted infections, or include more than one anti-HIV drug to protect against drug-resistant strains (and discourage drug-resistant strains from emerging). Mixed fibers could be designed to release drugs at different times to increase their potency, like the prime-boost method used in vaccines.

The electrospun cloth could be inserted directly in the body or be used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products.

Electrospinning has existed for decades, but it’s only recently been automated to make it practical for applications such as filtration and tissue engineering. This is the first study to use nanofibers for vaginal drug delivery.

While this technology is more discrete than a condom, and potentially more versatile than pills or plastic or rubber devices, researchers say there is no single right answer.

The citation and link to the article,

Drug-Eluting Fibers for HIV-1 Inhibition and Contraception by Cameron Ball, Emily Krogstad, Thanyanan Chaowanachan, Kim A. Woodrow (2012) PLoS ONE 7(11): e49792. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049792

Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded these researchers a $1M grant to pursue this work.

*ETA Dec.2.12: I erroneously used the word clothing in the headline. It’s now been corrected to ‘cloth’.

Canadian scientists get more light in deal with the US Argonne National Laboratory

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Canada’s synchrotron, Canadian Light Source (based in Saskatchewan), has signed a new three-year deal with the US Dept. of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source (APS)  that will give Canadian scientists more access to the APS facilities, according to the June 18, 2012 news item at the  Nanowerk website,

Seeking to solve some of today’s greatest global problems, scientists using x-ray light source facilities at national research laboratories in the United States and Canada are sharing more expertise.

The Canadian Light Source (CLS) and the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory agreed in January 2012 to a Partner User Proposal that cements a stronger working relationship between the two facilities for the next three years. These two premier light sources use different but complementary x-ray techniques to probe materials in order to understand chemical and structural behavior.

Tone Kunz’s June 18, 2012 news release for the APS provides details about the deal,

This new agreement will provide Canadian scientists with more research time to use the x-ray light source facilities and more time on a larger number of APS beamlines. Using varied x-ray and imaging capabilities will broaden the range of experiments Canadians may undertake at the APS to augment their research done at the Canadian Light Source. X-ray science offers potential solutions to a broad range of problems in surface, material, environmental and earth sciences, condensed matter physics, chemistry, and geosciences.

Since the Sector 20 beamlines became fully operational, scientists from Canada and other areas who have used these beamlines at the APS have produced an average of 51 scientific publications a year. This research includes the study of more effective mineral exploration strategies, ways to mitigate mine waste and mercury contamination, and novel ways to fabricate nanomaterials for use in fuel cells, batteries, and LEDs.

I had not realized how longstanding the  CLS/APS relationship has been,

Before the Canadian Light Source began operation in 2004, a Canadian group led by Daryl Crozier of Simon Fraser University, working in partnership with colleagues at the University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, helped found the Sector 20 beamlines at the APS as part of the Pacific Northwest Consortium Collaborative Access Team, or PNC-CAT. Parts of this team were included in the X-ray Science Division of the APS when it was formed.

This long-standing partnership has led to scientifically significant upgrades to the beamline. The new agreement will provide the valuable manpower and expertise to allow the APS to continue to push the innovation envelope. [emphasis mine]

As I was reading Kunz’s news release I kept asking, what’s in it for the APS? Apparently they need more “manpower and expertise.” Unfortunately, their future plans are a little shy of detail,

Scientists from the APS and the Canadian Light Source will work together on R&D projects to improve light-source technology. In particular, scientists will upgrade even further the two beamlines at Sector 20 in four key areas. This will provide a unique capability to prepare and measure in situ films and interfaces, a new technique to create quantitative three-dimensional chemical maps of samples, and improved forms of spectroscopy to expand the range of elements and types of environments that can be examined.

What are the four key areas? For that matter, what is Sector 20? I suspect some of my readers have similar questions about my postings. It’s easy (especially if you write frequently) to forget that your readers may not be as familiar as you are with the subject matter.

(I wrote about the CLS and another deal with a synchrotron in the UK in my May 31, 2011 posting.)

Science images too busy/ugly? Call the University of Washington’s Design Help Desk

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After several days at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2012 annual meeting, I can definitely support the design help desk project at the University of Washington (UW). From the Feb. 22, 2012 news item by Hannah Hickey on physorg.com,

A group of University of Washington researchers has launched a unique experiment matching science students with those in design. The new Design Help Desk, similar to a writing help desk, offers scientists a chance to meet with someone who can help them create more effective figures, tables and graphs.

“In modern publications, up to half of the space can be taken up by figures,” said principal investigator Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. His group studies materials at the nanometer scale, and much of the data is ultimately contained in microscope images.

“As a new faculty member, I was spending a lot of time teaching my students how to make figures for publications, even though I myself didn’t have any formal training,” Rolandi said.

It was a case of the blind leading the blind, he said. Rolandi sought out collaborators on campus, and eventually funding from the National Science Foundation, to create support that until now didn’t exist – and to study how well it works.

The research project (Design Help Desk) has two principal investigators, Rolandi and Karen Cheng, from Hickey’s Feb. 21, 2012 news release on the University of Washington website,

“We are becoming a more visual culture,” says Karen Cheng, a UW associate professor of design (who also completed a bachelor’s in chemical engineering). Still, most science visuals “could use significant improvement from a visual point of view,” she said. “It’s just not a field where design has been part of the training.”

This hasn’t always been the case. In Galileo’s time, scientists were also trained in art. These days, scientists often produce a graph using Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint’s default settings – which might look fine to them, but may have fundamental design problems. [emphasis mine]

Meanwhile, even journals are focusing on the importance of figures, often asking authors to improve them before publication.

“It’s not just about looking pretty. It’s about conveying complex information in a clear way,” Cheng said.

The point about science and art being more closely intertwined in the past was made Gunalan Nadarajan (Vice Provost at the Maryland Institute College of Art) at the AAAS 2012 annual meeting (my Feb. 20, 2012 posting). Nadarajan mentioned a new project being developed, Network for Science Engineering Art and Design. It’s so new they don’t yet have a website.

This is not being done in the wild. Scientists and designers are not set loose upon each other (from the UW news release),

Clients who arrive for a session at the Design Help Desk are first greeted by postdoctoral researcher Yeechi Chen, who earned her doctorate in physics at the UW and has completed a UW certificate course in natural science illustration. Chen can act as an intermediary between the scientist and the designer, and reassure new clients that scientists are involved in the project.

During the half-hour session, the scientist client and design consultant are alone in the room. The designer first asks the scientist about his or her goals – timeline, stage in the design process, publication venue, and main points to convey. The designers typically use pen and paper to sketch out their ideas.

The session is videotaped for use in the group’s study, if the client agrees. One camera records the face-to-face interaction, while a second camera on the ceiling records the sketching and hand movements.

Interestingly (to me anyway), the Design Help Desk appears on a UW webpage dedicated to Visual Communication in {Nano} Science. The page offers a very minimalist image, a description of the project and the team, and offers links to resources, e.g., A Brief Guide to Designing Effective Figures for the Scientific Paper ((behind a paywall)) which was published  in August 2011 in Advanced Materials.

Step closer to integrating electronics into the body

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The Sept. 20, 2011 news item (Proton-based transistor could let machines communicate with living things) on Nanowerk features a rather interesting development,

Human devices, from light bulbs to iPods, send information using electrons. Human bodies and all other living things, on the other hand, send signals and perform work using ions or protons.

Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things.

Here’s a diagram from the University of Washington Sept. 20, 2011 article about the proton transistor by Hannah Hickey,

 

On the left is a colored photo of the UW device overlaid on a graphic of the other components. On the right is a magnified image of the chitosan fibers. The white scale bar is 200 nanometers. (Marco Rolandi, UW)

Here’s a little more about the proton transistor (from the Hickey article),

In the body, protons activate “on” and “off” switches and are key players in biological energy transfer. Ions open and close channels in the cell membrane to pump things in and out of the cell. Animals including humans use ions to flex their muscles and transmit brain signals. A machine that was compatible with a living system in this way could, in the short term, monitor such processes. Someday it could generate proton currents to control certain functions directly.

A first step toward this type of control is a transistor that can send pulses of proton current. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a basic type of transistor that includes a gate, a drain and a source terminal for the current. The UW prototype is the first such device to use protons. It measures about 5 microns wide, roughly a twentieth the width of a human hair.

As for the device (from the Hickey article),

The device uses a modified form of the compound chitosan originally extracted from squid pen, a structure that survives from when squids had shells. The material is compatible with living things, is easily manufactured, and can be recycled from crab shells and squid pen discarded by the food industry.

There is a minor Canadian connection,

Computer models of charge transport developed by co-authors M.P. Anantram, a UW professor of electrical engineering, and Anita Fadavi Roudsari at Canada’s University of Waterloo, were a good match for the experimental results.

If I understand this correctly, the computer models were confirmed by the experimental  results, which means the computer models can be used (to augment the use of expensive experiments) with a fair degree of confidence.

I am finding this integration of electronics into the body both fascinating and disturbing as per my paper, Whose electric brain? More about that when I have more time.

A*STAR and University of Washington joint optoelectronics project

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At the University of Washington located in Seattle, a joint project with A*STAR, Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research is about to get underway. From the Sept. 16, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and the University of Washington announce that they will join forces to provide shared Silicon Photonics processes as part of the Optoelectronics Systems Integration in Silicon programme (OpSIS). This will help the research and development (R&D) community significantly reduce the fabrication cost of silicon photonics integrated circuits.

…

The silicon photonics integrated circuits to be created under this programme will be immediately available to the photonic research community worldwide, and in the process, facilitate technological advancements and proliferate creative ideas for the development of the next generation devices. As the platform will be offered through multi-project wafer (MPW) runs, which allow users from multiple projects to share the costs of a single fabrication run, research costs are lowered significantly for individual projects.

More information at A*STAR’s Institute of Microeletronics (IME) can be found here and about the University of Washington’s OpSIS programme here.

Folding, origami, and shapeshifting and an article with over 50,000 authors

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I’m on a metaphor kick these days so here goes, origami (Japanese paper folding), and shapeshifting are metaphors used to describe a certain biological process that nanoscientists from fields not necessarily associated with biology find fascinating, protein folding.

Origami

Take for example a research team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) working to exploit the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes (mentioned in a Nov. 9, 2010 news item on Nanowerk). One of the big issues is that since all of the tubes in a sample are made of carbon getting one tube to react on its own without activating the others is quite challenging when you’re trying to create nanoelectronic circuits. The research team decided to use a technique developed in a bioengineering lab (from the news item),

DNA origami is a type of self-assembled structure made from DNA that can be programmed to form nearly limitless shapes and patterns (such as smiley faces or maps of the Western Hemisphere or even electrical diagrams). Exploiting the sequence-recognition properties of DNA base paring, DNA origami are created from a long single strand of viral DNA and a mixture of different short synthetic DNA strands that bind to and “staple” the viral DNA into the desired shape, typically about 100 nanometers (nm) on a side.

Single-wall carbon nanotubes are molecular tubes composed of rolled-up hexagonal mesh of carbon atoms. With diameters measuring less than 2 nm and yet with lengths of many microns, they have a reputation as some of the strongest, most heat-conductive, and most electronically interesting materials that are known. For years, researchers have been trying to harness their unique properties in nanoscale devices, but precisely arranging them into desirable geometric patterns has been a major stumbling block.

…

… To integrate the carbon nanotubes into this system, the scientists colored some of those pixels anti-red, and others anti-blue, effectively marking the positions where they wanted the color-matched nanotubes to stick. They then designed the origami so that the red-labeled nanotubes would cross perpendicular to the blue nanotubes, making what is known as a field-effect transistor (FET), one of the most basic devices for building semiconductor circuits.

Although their process is conceptually simple, the researchers had to work out many kinks, such as separating the bundles of carbon nanotubes into individual molecules and attaching the single-stranded DNA; finding the right protection for these DNA strands so they remained able to recognize their partners on the origami; and finding the right chemical conditions for self-assembly.

After about a year, the team had successfully placed crossed nanotubes on the origami; they were able to see the crossing via atomic force microscopy. These systems were removed from solution and placed on a surface, after which leads were attached to measure the device’s electrical properties. When the team’s simple device was wired up to electrodes, it indeed behaved like a field-effect transistor

Shapeshifting

For another more recent example (from an August 5, 2010 article on physorg.com by Larry Hardesty,  Shape-shifting robots),

By combining origami and electrical engineering, researchers at MIT and Harvard are working to develop the ultimate reconfigurable robot — one that can turn into absolutely anything. The researchers have developed algorithms that, given a three-dimensional shape, can determine how to reproduce it by folding a sheet of semi-rigid material with a distinctive pattern of flexible creases. To test out their theories, they built a prototype that can automatically assume the shape of either an origami boat or a paper airplane when it receives different electrical signals. The researchers reported their results in the July 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Professor Daniela Rus researches systems of robots that can work together to tackle complicated tasks. One of the big research areas in distributed robotics is what’s called “programmable matter,” the idea that small, uniform robots could snap together like intelligent Legos to create larger, more versatile robots.

Here’s a video from this site at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) describing the process,

Folding and over 50, 000 authors

With all this I’ve been leading up to a fascinating project, a game called Foldit, that a team from the University of Washington has published results from in the journal Nature (Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game), Aug. 5, 2010.

With over 50,000 authors, this study is a really good example of citizen science (discussed in my May 14, 2010 posting and elsewhere here) and how to use games to solve science problems while exploiting a fascination with folding and origami. From the Aug. 5, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

The game, Foldit, turns one of the hardest problems in molecular biology into a game a bit reminiscent of Tetris. Thousands of people have now played a game that asks them to fold a protein rather than stack colored blocks or rescue a princess.

…

Scientists know the pieces that make up a protein but cannot predict how those parts fit together into a 3-D structure. And since proteins act like locks and keys, the structure is crucial.

At any moment, thousands of computers are working away at calculating how physical forces would cause a protein to fold. But no computer in the world is big enough, and computers may not take the smartest approach. So the UW team tried to make it into a game that people could play and compete. Foldit turns protein-folding into a game and awards points based on the internal energy of the 3-D protein structure, dictated by the laws of physics.

Tens of thousands of players have taken the challenge. The author list for the paper includes an acknowledgment of more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication.

…

“It’s a new kind of collective intelligence, as opposed to individual intelligence, that we want to study,”Popoviç [principal investigator Zoran Popoviç, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering] said. “We’re opening eyes in terms of how people think about human intelligence and group intelligence, and what the possibilities are when you get huge numbers of people together to solve a very hard problem.”

There’s a more at Nanowerk including a video about the gamers and the scientists. I think most of us take folding for granted and yet it stimulates all kinds of research and ideas.