Nobel Prize for chemistry 2008

Man...this sure is fun watching the live web cast of the announcement of winners of Nobel Prize. Today were announced the Nobel Prize winners for chemistry. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, Roger Y. Tsien were awarded the prize for their discovery and explanation of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). The protein was first discovered and isolated from a jelly fish. GFP has a lot of uses. It is basically applied in cell biology, to visualise its contents, and other biological applications.

Thanks to the load shedding I could only watch the fifteen minutes of the press conference. The announcer actually had a culture of E. coli in which the GFP gene was incorporated. When he waved the culture over a UV source it glowed green. Then they showed how HIVs could be visualised inside the lymphocytes using GFP. 

Im excited for the Nobel Prize for literature due to be announced tomorrow :)

Blue Brain

Blue Brain is a project that began in May 2005 in Switzerland. The aim of this project is to simulate the human brain down to the molecular level. By the end of 2006, the team has successfully simulated a rat neocortical column (column: functional unit of brain, 2 x 0.5 mm). A column in rat contains 10,000 neurons. To construct this biologically accurate, functional model of the brain they have used IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer, considered the most powerful computer in the world. Would this model be able to work like an individual human brain? In their own words: "The Blue Brain project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. It is an attempt to reverse engineer the brain, to explore how it functions and to serve as a tool for neuroscientists and medical researchers. It is not an attempt to create a brain. It is not an artificial intelligence project. Although we may one day acheive insights into the basic nature of intelligence and consciousness using this tool, the Blue Brain Project is focused on creating a physiological simulation for biomedical applications."