STANFORD'S IDEAL DESTINY

Why genes aren't destiny.

The remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives. Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th centu...

Geometry and Destiny

SUMMARY The recognition that the cosmological constant may be non-zero forces us to re-evaluate standard notions about the connection between geometry and the fate of our Universe. An open Universe can recollapse, and a closed Universe can expand forever. As a corollary, we point out that there is no set of cosmological observations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine w...

Polarity Is Destiny

The GTPase Cdc42 specifies polarity in various biological processes. Kesavan et al. (2009) now demonstrate that Cdc42 also regulates epithelial cell polarity in the developing mouse pancreas, where it is required for tubule formation and maintenance. Furthermore, the polarization of epithelial tissue influences the differentiation of pancreatic progenitor cells, linking cell polarity to cell sp...

Green Destiny + mpiBLAST = Bioinfomagic

This paper outlines how our highly efficient, power-aware supercomputer called Green Destiny and our open-source parallelization of BLAST called mpiBLAST combine to create a bit of “bioinfomagic.” Green Destiny, featured in The New York Times and winner of a 2003 R&D 100 Award, revolutionized high-performance computing by re-defining performance to focus on issues of efficiency, reliability, an...

Destiny of Insignificance