What do Transformer, Inner Space and Terminator have in common?

Well, they are all movie of course. Hehehe

Aside from that, the themes depicted in these flicks are the subjects of scientists’ increase in endorphins level: Programmable Matter

The Programmable Matter program is made of individual pieces that can self-assemble into tools or spare parts. One of the approaches being examined uses sheets of self-folding material that can form three-dimensional shapes on command. Bringing polymorphism to reality in its smallest way, the DNA.

Among the projects are:

1. Two-dimensional objects that fold into three-dimensional shapes to particles that build up to larger structures. An Example is the “self-folding origami” machines that use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.

2. One Harvard team has developed a programming language to manipulate the DNA. Researchers can command the binding interactions between long synthesized strands of DNA, something that has never been done before.

3. Another team has developed a way to both program and coat objects with DNA. The DNA strands act as a “molecular Velcro” to hold small objects together to assemble into a tool. After it is used, the DNA can be commanded to release and disassemble the object.

4. Another team’s approach mimics biological functions on a millimeter scale to copy how proteins are built in living organisms. Scientists created a programming language that allows each component of the material to process information.
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I am always fascinated by the challenges in life. With that I mean, the contradictions that life offers: life and death, heaven and hell, yin and yang, masculine and feminine and many other dualities in the process. It remained a ghost that haunts me in the darkest days and illuminating nights of my existence. It serves as the driving force to be funny serious or seriously funny in making sense of its meaning. Being a believer of “to see is to believe” facilitates my burying of this instinct to my deepest thoughts that eventually leads me to fancy in my waking hours. My conscious state suggests relying on things that work like science in decoding these triggers.

And so I did.

As the wind blows. This is my first ever published poem in the student paper way back eons ago. It is inspired by the idea of birth, nurturance, arrogance and death.

My daily dosage of facts is sustained by the information on oxygen and how it fell prey in the trap of duality:

As humans, we are caught in a cruel bind. The oxygen that sustains us is also responsible for the aging process itself and the degenerative diseases that are part of aging. We are not alone in this regard—all other mammals and aerobic organisms are utilizing oxygen as a source of energy and suffer the same consequences. We survive in a narrow band of safety, protected only by the enzymes that air-breathing organisms have developed during their evolution from plant life to animal life.

Reduced form of oxygen are considered free radicals and extremely toxic.

Good thing that 80% of the reduced oxygen to water produces no free radicals. Instead, the energy generates by the enzyme cytochrome oxidase is utilized by the cell and deposited in cell’s energy storage molecule ATP (adenosine triphosphate).

However, the reduction of the remaining 20%, according to a study, is the source of the radical rogue molecules that severely damaged our DNA, our key enzymes and any other proteins they contact. That shouts in our face the aging process:

A one-step addition of an electron to oxygen produces a superoxide radical, a two-step reduction of oxygen produces hydrogen peroxide, and a three-step reduction of oxygen produces the most powerful of them all, the hydroxyl radical. The final, four-step reduction produces water. All of these intermediate, partially reduced forms of oxygen are free radical rogue molecules, which react with and severely damage our DNA, our key enzymes and any other proteins they contact. This is the fundamental cause of the aging process. Read More