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Observational data has lead us to believe that the Universe is undergoing an accelerated expansion. This acceleration can only be driven by a component which has a negative pressure, the cosmological constant or other exotic models such as the ‘dark energy’. Understanding the nature of dark energy is the focus of many current studies, and its origin being unknown, these studies are largely focused...
Prof. Supurna Sinha is a researcher at the Department of Theoretical Physics, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru. She specializes in equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. She was Professor Maria Cristina Marchetti’s first PhD student.
The aim of this expository article is to introduce the reader to some of the fundamental milestones in the study of prime numbers across several centuries. Among the important developments in the study of prime numbers, we review the history of the prime number theorem, the Riemann zeta function (in relation to prime number theory), and some recent investigations into spacings between consecutive...
Life starts from a single cell formed by the union of the sperm and egg. Genes inherited from the parents influence many features of the offspring — from physical appearance and disease susceptibility to more complex traits like behavior and cognitive abilities. Inherited RNA, both protein-coding and non-coding, transferred from the parents to the zygote can modify the information in the genome of...
Circuits with linear threshold functions as primitives are a natural model for computation in the brain. Small threshold circuits of depth two cannot compute most functions, but how do we prove such a statement? And how do we lay our hands on explicit functions that they cannot compute? This article gives an overview of the landscape.
Mildred Dresselhaus was one of the most renowned physicists, material scientists, and electrical engineers of our time. She made vital contributions to research on graphite and graphite intercalation compounds, graphene, carbon fibers and nanotubes, fullerenes, and thermoelectric effects of nanostructures. Mildred Dresselhaus was considered the leading expert on carbon materials, and was popularly...
Proteins are essential biological macromolecules associated with a variety of physiological functions. In this article, the composition, conformational features, and general principles that govern protein folding are presented.
Cancer is a global health burden; 1 in 2 people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during their lifetime. In the Western world, 50% of cancer patients survive for 10 or more years after diagnosis, compared to 24% forty years earlier. Cancer can come in many different forms, but tissues affected by cancer tend to have common features such as abnormal cell growth rates. Cancer biology is incredibly...
The celebrated Michaelis-Menten (MM) expression provides a fundamental relation between the rate of enzyme catalysis and substrate concentration. The validity of this classical expression is, however, restricted to macroscopic amounts of enzymes and substrates and, thus, to processes with negligible fluctuations. Recent experiments have measured fluctuations in the catalytic rate to reveal that the...
Mechanical forces are known to play important roles in determining cellular functions and behaviours such as growth, migration, wound healing and tissue regeneration, to name a few. It is quite intriguing how cells sense the mechanical forces and properties of the surrounding matrix in which the cells float or rest. The cells are known to build numerous ‘adhesion contacts’ at the cell-matrix interface...
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