Spectroscopy: NMR down to Earth

Back down to Earth

About a decade ago, systems biology hit the life sciences with the promise that it would revolutionize biological research and create new products, drugs and therapies along the way. As with so many over-hyped ‘breakthroughs’, it inevitably failed to deliver, prompting criticism from a number of eminent biologists. Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, for example, accused systems biologists of us...

Bringing GRACE Down to Earth.

Introduction NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which is a joint mission of the United States and Germany, uses a pair of coupled satellites to measure spatial and temporal changes in the Earth’s gravity field. From these data, estimates of changes (time-variable anomalies) in mass are derived. In turn, the mass changes are attributed primarily to changes in water content (...

Introduction to biomolecular NMR spectroscopy

Blue-Sky and Down-to-Earth

We discuss how traditional methods for understanding design requirements are leveraged to produce innovative and fundamentally new perspectives when using analogy. We call these analogous practice approaches, and illustrate two cases that both use analogy to achieve exploratory design with ethnography, by gathering data from a different setting than we intend to design for. We discuss how the u...

Bringing the Sun Down to Earth

The sun is often portrayed as a “laboratory for astrophysics” but it is a laboratory over which we have no control. Instead, solar physicists employ a wide range of theoretical, computational, and observational tools to study the magnetically driven activity on the sun. The challenge for these methods is that solar physics is extremely complex, making it difficult to isolate the key drivers of ...