Jim's Blog

Instant gratification is definitely taking to long these days. We all want faster computers and that usually means faster memory access as well as CPU clock speeds. The new player on the horizon is memristors. These promise denser memory storage, faster access and, ultimately, my gratification time taking a dive. Engineers have been clawing their [...]

It appears that consuming caffeine is causing a buzz around the computers of some of the epidemiologists of the NIH in Rockville. The old picture of the dedicated scientist poring over a problem, drinking cup after cup of strong coffee and smoking one cigarette after another no longer holds, but the coffee, well that’s another [...]

Bacteria have potential for manufacturing a wide range of materials, but they also play host to viruses called bacteriophages. The M13 bacteriophage is one such species which propagates rapidly inside an infected bacteria. The M13 phage is a small rod shape virus (880nm x 6.6nm) and when concentrated, the rods line up to form liquid [...]

Education is good for you and we all get some even if it is at the hands of our parents and peer group. In general we expect the population to go to school, learn lots of good stuff and then make a good living with that knowledge so that we can all enjoy the good [...]

Smoking cigarettes is generally accepted as being bad for us and there are lots of studies around second-hand smoking, though the term “passive” is probably a better descriptor. There are a large number of conditions that are a problem due to cigarette smoke in addition to heart and lungs. Apparently it appears to be a [...]