A digital twin of our planet is to simulate the Earth system in future. It is intended to support policy-?makers in taking appropriate measures to better prepare for extreme events. A new strategy paper by European scientists and ETH Zurich computer scientists shows how this can be achieved.
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IMAGE: Dr James Knight and Prof Thomas Nowotny of the University of Sussex School of Engineering and Informatics. view more
Credit: Stuart Robinson/University of Sussex
University of Sussex academics have established a method of turbocharging desktop PCs to give them the same capability as supercomputers worth tens of millions of pounds.
Dr James Knight and Prof Thomas Nowotny from the University of Sussex s School of Engineering and Informatics used the latest Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to give a single desktop PC the capacity to simulate brain models of almost unlimited size.
The researchers believe the innovation, detailed in
To Treat Alzheimerâs, Try Inciting a More Frenzied Amyloid Dance
Amyloid-β plaques and tau in the brain. [National Institute on Aging/National Institutes of Health]
January 14, 2021
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Amyloid proteins are inherently disordered, adopting shape after shape as though they were dancers anxious to satisfy a mad choreographer. Seen this way, amyloid proteins might seem pitiable. But amyloid proteins are best kept in a frenzy, suggest researchers based at Cambridge University. These researchers, led by Michele Vendruscolo, PhD, have found that amyloid proteins may be less likely to aggregate and form Alzheimerâs plaques if they are subject to a choreography that keeps them maximally disordered.
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Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Milan and Google Research have used machine learning techniques to predict how proteins, particularly those implicated in neurological diseases, completely change their shapes in a matter of microseconds.
They found that when amyloid beta, a key protein implicated in Alzheimer s disease, adopts a highly disordered shape, it actually becomes less likely to stick together and form the toxic clusters which lead to the death of brain cells.
The results, reported in the journal
Nature Computational Science, could aid in the future development of treatments for diseases involving disordered proteins, such as Alzheimer s disease and Parkinson s disease.
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IMAGE: A major roadblock to computational design of high-entropy alloys has been removed, according to scientists at Iowa State University and Lehigh University. Engineers from the Ames Lab and Lehigh University s. view more
Credit: Ames Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy
A major roadblock to computational design of high-entropy alloys has been removed, according to scientists at Iowa State University and Lehigh University. Engineers from the Ames Lab and Lehigh University s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics have developed a process that reduces search time used for predictive design 13,000-fold.
According to Ganesh Balasubramanian, an associate professor at Lehigh, the goal of the team s research was to accelerate the computational modeling of complex alloys. The tools available for creating random distribution of atoms in materials simulation models, he says, have been used for many, many years now and are limited in their reach for fast