How to understand our Child's Constipation?

Learning how to understand language

To understand how babies breathe...

How Will Kinetics and Thermodynamics Inform Our Future Efforts to Understand and Build Biological Systems?

When I started graduate school, we were taught that every protein has a single unique three-dimensional structure that defines its function. Thirty years later, it is now clear that many proteins include domains that assume different structures in response to binding partners or small molecules. Likewise, RNA molecules can form kinetically trapped intermediates that slowly refold into their fun...

Terra Cognita: Using Earth Observing Systems to Understand Our World

Background: The need for discovery of alternative, renewable, environmentally friendly energy sources and the development of cost-efficient, "clean" methods for their conversion into higher fuels becomes imperative. Ethanol, whose significance as fuel has dramatically increased in the last decade, can be produced from hexoses and pentoses through microbial fermentation. Importantly, plant bioma...

How to understand and outwit adaptation.

Adaptation is the ability of a system to respond and reset itself even in the continuing presence of a stimulus. On one hand, adaptation is a physiological necessity that enables proper neuronal signaling and cell movement. On the other hand, adaptation can be a source of annoyance, as it can make biological systems resistant to experimental perturbations. Here we speculate where adaptation mig...