NRC looking for some grand ideas

Grand ideas floating freely

Prion protein (PrP) is critically involved in the transmission and pathogenesis of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), which include scrapie in sheep, variant and sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle. The normal, cellular PrPc protein encoded by the Prnp gene is required for susceptibility to TSE. The interconv...

Some Ideas for Final Projects

1.8. Investigate algorithms for expressing an integer as a sum of squares. We have determined exactly which integers are sums of two squares. Later on in the course we will prove which integers are sums of four squares (Lagrange’s theorem) and state without proof which integers are sums of three squares (Legendre-Gauss theorem). But these methods do not give efficient algorithms for actually fi...

Good Ideas, through the Looking Glass

An entire potpourri of ideas is listed from the past decades of Computer Science and Computer Technology. Widely acclaimed at their time, many have lost in splendor and brilliance under today’s critical scrutiny. We try to find reasons. Some of the ideas are almost forgotten. But we believe that they are worth recalling, not the least because one must try to learn from the past, be it for the s...

Some Ideas About Colour

Some ideas from thermodynamics

The branch of physics called thermodynamics deals with the laws governing the behavior of physical systems at finite temperature. These laws are phenomenological, in the sense that they represent empirical relations between various observed quantities. These quantities include pressure, temperature, density and other measurable parameters that define the state of a given system. Thus, in discus...