1. An increasing number of experts think skimming through a article make us more stupider and say it's time to slow down.
2. The interpretation of different writers might be different, towards various issues and concepts. feeling bored and getting lost can happen sometimes but still holding the patience can provide you fruitful results. 
3. Reading an article completely can give you enormous amount of courage and confidence to share the topic in your group at colleges or work places.
4. When you develop the habit of reading the articles completely, you can be a thought  ... Read more »

Only the most hardcore puzzle-solvers ever go beyond the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's cube, attempting much larger ones such as those pictured on the right. Now an algorithm has been developed that can solve a Rubik's cube of any size. It might offer clues to humans trying to deal with these tricky beasts.

Rubik's cube science got a boost last year when a team led by programmer Tomas Rokicki of Palo Alto, California, showed that even the most scrambled standard Rubik's cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. That feat was a big deal: the figure has been dubbed "God's number", the assumption being that the Almighty couldn't solve it faster. But that result didn't shed light on the monster cubes.

So Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out to find a general algorithm for solving a cube with any side-length – of n squares.

The new approach differs from that of Rokicki's. The latter used a "brute force" method, relying on computers borrowed from Google to check all 43 quintillion possible solutions, but Demaine says doing the same for larger cubes would be impossible. "You can't solve all values of n with computational search," he explains.

Cubie paths

Instead, Demaine's team started by looking at a method Rubik's cube enthusiasts commonly use to quickly solve the puzzle. Essentially, you try to move a single square, or "cubie", into the desired position while leaving the rest of the cube as unchanged as possible. Because it's not possible to move a single cubie without disturbing others, this method is time-consuming, requiring a number of moves that is proportional to n².

Demaine and his colleagues found a short-cut. Each cubie has a particular path that will place it in the correct position. His algorithm looks for cubies that all need to go in the same direction, then moves them at the same time. "We found that instead of solving one cubie at a time, you can parallelise that process and solve several," Demaine says.

Grouping cubies with similar paths reduces the number of moves required by a factor of around log n. This means that the maximum number of moves that will ever be required for a cube of side n is proportional to n ^{... Read more »}

The genetic code common to all life is not set in stone. We can change it at its most fundamental level for our own purposes. Genetic engineers have invented a new way to quickly, precisely and thoroughly rewrite the genome of living bacteria.

The technique could make drug-producing bacteria immune to viruses, prevent laboratory engineered organisms from genetically contaminating wildlife and enable scientists to construct proteins that do not exist in nature.

Farren Isaacs of Yale University led the team that this week proves it is possible to make numerous and very precise changes in the genome of living cells. "In the process we are recoding organisms that could have completely new functionality."

"I think it's a tour de force, one of the top 10 papers of the year," saysFrederick Blattner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study. "Even though the genes are essential, they can be altered."

Ultimately, the study paves the way for re-coding the universal genetic code.

Stop sign swap

Isaacs and his colleagues systematically replaced one three-letter sequence in the genome of Escherichia coli with another.

Three-letter genetic sequences are known as codons, and they can either code for an amino acid – the building blocks of proteins – or act as stop signals. A cell's internal machinery reads copies of the genome, and as it goes along it links the corresponding amino acids together into protein strings until it reaches a stop codon.

The researchers sifted through the E. coli genome and identified all 314 TAG stop codons. They then designed fragments of single-stranded DNA that, with the assistance of viral enzymes, would replace the TAG stop codons with TAA, another stop codon.

Isaacs submerged a billion E. coli cells in pools of water brimming with the bits of DNA and viral enzymes, and zapped the mixture with electricity, opening pores in the bacteria's cell membranes for the DNA to pass through. The process is known as multiplex automated genome engineering, or MAGE.

Pizza party

Isaacs then isolated 32 strains from the mixture, each of which had around 10 TAA codons instead of TAG codons at different points in the genome. The next challenge was to combine these partially rewritten genomes into a single genome with 314 TAA stop codons and no TAG codons. How did they do it? Think promiscuous pizzas.

... Read more »