Toy Blocks and Rotational Physics

Sketching protein aggregation with a physics-based toy model.

We explore the applicability of a single-bead coarse-grained molecular model to describe the competition between protein folding and aggregation. We have designed very simple and regular sequences, based on our previous studies on peptide aggregation, that successfully fold into the three main protein structural families (all-α, all-β, and α + β). Thanks to equilibrium computer simulations, we ...

The Physics of Rotational Flattening and the Point Core Model

A point mass at the center of an ellipsoidal homogeneous fluid is used as a simple model to study the effect of rotation on the shape and external gravitational field of planets and stars. Maclaurin’s analytical result for a homogenous body is generalized to this model. The absence of a third order term in the Taylor expansion of the Maclaurin function leads to further simple but very accurate ...

VLEGO: A Simple Two-handed Modeling Environment Based on Toy Blocks

This paper describes a case study of building a prototype of an immersive three dimensional (3-D) modeler which supports simple two-handed operations. Designing 3-D objects in a virtual environment has a number of advantages for 3-D geometry creation over designing with traditional computer aided design (CAD) tools. In order to enhance the human-computer interaction in a virtual workspace, twoh...

Light Front Nuclear Physics: Toy Models, Static Sources and Tilted Light Front Coordinates

The principles behind the detailed results of a light-front mean field theory of finite nuclei are elucidated by deriving the nucleon mode equation using a simple general argument, based on the idea that a static source in equal time coordinates corresponds to a moving source in light front coordinates. This idea also allows us to solve several simple toy model examples: scalar field in a box, ...

Globalization And Inequality In Different Economic Blocks