The rocky road to biomolecules

Carbohydrate structure: the rocky road to automation.

With the introduction of intuitive graphical software, structural biologists who are not experts in crystallography are now able to build complete protein or nucleic acid models rapidly. In contrast, carbohydrates are in a wholly different situation: scant automation exists, with manual building attempts being sometimes toppled by incorrect dictionaries or refinement problems. Sugars are the mo...

WattDB - a Rocky Road to Energy Proportionality

Energy efficiency is becoming more important in database design, i. e., the work delivered by a database server should be accomplished by minimal energy consumption. So far, a substantial number of research papers examined and optimized the energy consumption of database servers or single components. In this way, our first efforts were exclusively focused on the use of flash memory or SSDs in a...

The rocky road to the top: why talent needs trauma.

The increasingly well funded and high-tech world of talent development (TD) represents an important investment for most sports. Reflecting traditional concepts of challenge and focus, the vast majority of such systems expend a great deal of effort maximizing support to the young athletes and trying to counter the impact of naturally occurring life stressors. In this article, we suggest that muc...

The rocky road: qualitative research as evidence.

Ecosystems: The Rocky Road to Regime-Shift Indicators

Ecosystems can undergo dramatic shifts from one stable state to another. While indicators of such shifts are well known, experimental tests are few and far between. A new study on rocky shore ecosystems now offers a test of warning indicators.