Falling into Traps

Choosing the best Standard Cell Library without falling into the traps of traditional benchmarking methods

Falling into TRAPS – receptor misfolding in the TNF receptor 1-associated periodic fever syndrome

TNF receptor-associated periodic syndrome (TRAPS) is a dominantly inherited disease caused by missense mutations in the TNF receptor 1 (TNFR1) gene. Patients suffer from periodic bouts of severe abdominal pain, localised inflammation, migratory rashes, and fever. More than 40 individual mutations have been identified, all of which occur in the extracellular domain of TNFR1. In the present revie...

Falling into a black hole

String theory tells us that quantum gravity has a dual description as a field theory (without gravity). We use the field theory dual to ask what happens to an object as it falls into the simplest black hole: the 2-charge extremal hole. In the field theory description the wavefunction of a particle is spread over a large number of ‘loops’, and the particle has a well-defined position in space on...

Observe matter falling into a black hole

It has been well known that in the point of view of a distant observer, all in-falling matter to a black hole (BH) will be eventually stalled and “frozen” just outside the event horizon of the BH, although an in-falling observer will see the matter falling straight through the event horizon. Thus in this “frozen star” scenario, as distant observers, we could never observe matter falling into a ...

Searching fast for a target on DNA without falling to traps.

Genomic expression depends critically on both the ability of regulatory proteins to locate specific target sites on DNA within seconds and on the formation of long-lived (many minutes) complexes between these proteins and the DNA. Equilibrium experiments show that indeed regulatory proteins bind tightly to their target site. However, they also find strong binding to other nonspecific sites whic...