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"The planet's immune system is doing everything it can. The planet's immune system is doing everything it can."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Ideator | ||
| A computer device specifically made to help model genes and proteins for identification. |
In this novel, Bear describes the future of the children created in Darwin's Radio. There is a lot of future thinking about the study of microbiology; it comes up as the protagonists try to study an illness that affects these children.
| Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of 3-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification. There was more than a wealth of equipment here: what Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn't have been able to compete. "Wow," Dicken said in awe... he walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north - to its sleeping, glacial form. |
| Technovelgy from Darwin's Children,
by Greg Bear. Published by Del Rey in 2003 Additional resources -
|
In looking around for anything else on this item, I did find what appears to be a (failed) computer-aided design product called an Ideator.
I found a very cool tool called ProtoShop (nicely backformed on Photoshop, the image manipulation tool). Here's what it does:
Our work focuses on providing an interactive, visual tool - dubbed ProtoShop - to rapidly create many initial configurations for a given amino acid sequence, which are then submitted to an optimization algorithm...
One of the grand challenges in computational biology is the prediction of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its chemical makeup alone. A protein's primary structure, i.e., its amino acid sequence, is directly encoded in its DNA sequence; this, however, is a purely one-dimensional structure that does not directly encode a three-dimensional shape...
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| Black Fungus Blocks Radiation |
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
