Saturday, October 14, 2006

Shedding Light

I spent several hours today just trying to get my computational structural biology assignment sorted out. It was fun though, playing around on html and various molecular visualisation softwares about. You might want to have a go at PyMol, or you can download here if that link does work (I have problems accessing it). You can easily find tools to help you out at PyMolWiki.

You can download various protein structures at the Protein Data Bank. There are visualisation tools at the site as well, but I quite like PyMol, I think it's rather user friendly. These things are great to help you visualise a protein, whose structure has a huge impact on its function.

There are many other tools out there, including Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD), RasMol, Swiss PDB, MolMol and so on. I'm sure there are tons more, but these are what were mentioned in my lecture.

Oh dear, enough biology, I reckon. Otherwise I'm really going further into the "dark side". I must admit though, biophysics is relatively new and unexplored, so it does appeal lots to physicists looking for new challenges. Of course, it helps that the effects of your research probably have more obvious and tangible benefits to mankind.

Whoah, now it all sounds noble. Oh well!

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The Dark Side

A couple of us (rather, really just me) have started calling the biology-related research as "the dark side". All just harmless, whimsical jokes, really.

But this is cool anyway, which makes you want to go from light to darkness. Ha ha!

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Physics Nobel Prize

Ah, I've been away too long! I'll like to think it's all the hustle and bustle of adjusting to the US and to being a graduate student. The transition's actually not as hard as in my undergraduate years, perhaps in large part because I knew several people prior to arriving at Stanford. Of course, having familiar housemates helps too, then we can cook familiar, nostalgia-filled, traditional meals, or whatever semblence of that. Although, admittedly we're still adjusting to everything and the way of life here, so we're not quite into cooking just yet.

Anyway, I was kinda hoping that the Physics Nobel Prize would be won by someone at Stanford (not that I had anyone in mind). You might have heard that Andrew Z. Fire from Stanford won the Nobel Prize in Medicine (shared with Craig C. Mello). It was on the front cover of The Stanford Daily yesterday, and my friends had a free meal over at the Med Sch (I think!) in celebration of his award. So naturally, being properly inaugurated as a graduate student, I would look all out for free food locations, and wanted a similar reception for the Physics department... Oh well. Seriously though, it'll be quite nice to have someone in your own university department winning a Nobel Prize (there are a few in Physics/Applied Physics who have got awards before, I think...) during your time there.

So, before I end of to read on photonics, have a look at who won the Physics prize here. Hey, one of them is from Berkeley! It's not that far to go for free food...

More next time!