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Mrs. Garrison:    Principal Victoria, it is wrong! [she's at the principal's office, her back to the principal's desk.] It is wrong and I simply will not do it! [walks back to the desk] I care about my students, and I will not fill their heads with lies! [pounds the desk for emphasis] I am NOT teaching evolution in my class!! [Mr. Mackey is also present]

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Viendo el blog de faqoff me entero tarde de la iniciativa Blog Action Day, asi que con todo el morro hago un copypaste y os animo a leer esta interesante entrada en Blogoff : 

Aquí va nuestra pequeña contribución al Blog Action Day, que se celebra hoy con el objetivo de concienciar a la gente sobre el medioambiente y sus peligros.

Creo que si hay un programa popular que esté relacionado con el deterioro del medioambiente, la contaminación, la deforestación y otros problemas similares ese es Google Earth. Para los que no están familiarizados con el software de mapas de Google pueden leer nuestro tutorial. En esta entrada vamos a repasar algunas de las herramientas que nos proporciona este software para visualizar el impacto de la industrialización y el consumo en en nuestro pequeño planeta.

 Seguir Leyendo > Blogoff >>>>

Technorati Tags: Medioambiente, Blog Action Day, Google Earth

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In the macroscopic world every product is assembled following a blueprint and using a set of assemblers with fixed bricks and boards. In bionanomachines the same principle is used, the assembler is the ribosome and the blueprints is the DNA. There is stored the information needed to construct different kinds of products. The process is simple and universal, for every organism on Earth is done as described in previous chapters.

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The first step to construct any nanomachine is to build the structure. This is not an easy goal, atoms can't be modeled as they were any macroscopic material. They follow a set of rules to interact with another atoms.

Chemists have studied the properties of these atoms and biologists the details of the nanomachines constructed by them. So we have now the knowledge to start creating these new nanomachines. We are going to review the different methods followed to do that.

The natural bionanomachinery is designed for a specific environment. It is done for working inside cells, in a water environment. Without that conditions they don't work properly or don't work at all. The temperature is also important, the most common is 37º. In this environment nanomachines are stable, but they can be destroyed to create new ones with a little energy cost. The life of a nanomachine is between seconds to a year (but this is rare).

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We have now many methods to construct atomic-level machines. Bionanotechnology is the easiest way to do that because there are already nanomachines that can work for us. We don't have to implement everything, atom by atom, by ourselves. To do this we can make those machines to construct molecules they already can make but with some little changes, or we can design nanomachines entirely and make those already implemented workers to make them for us. But this is much more difficult than introduce some changes. For example, if we know a protein that actually works it is easier to give it some new features than to construct a whole protein from scratch because it is still a expensive problem to predict the structure of that protein, and it is important for the operation of that protein.

Recombinant DNA technology is the main process to construct this proteins. It is about changing the DNA that stores the information to create the protein and then wait until ribosoms create it for us. We use two natural enzimes for this, restriction enzimes and DNA ligase. Using this we can cut and paste DNA to make our own sequence.Some of this enzimes are being sold in the market, so now it is easy and not so expensive to manipulate DNA. There is a variety of natural biomolecules for handling DNA, like:Restriction enzimes: isolated from bacteria. Used to cut DNA.DNA ligase: reconnects broken DNA strands.DNA polymerase creates a new DNA strand by using another strand as a template.
Once we have a new DNA we can duplicate it using: DNA cloning and polymerase chain reaction.
The DNA cloning create identical chains. To do this we can inject DNA in a virus and let it to inject the DNA in some bacteria. Then they will duplicate, so we will have a lot of identical cells.
The polymerase chain reaction is for coping a small sample of DNA. We use another bacteria for this. Forte it to duplicate. Using this method we can have as many DNA as we need.
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In a human body there are more than 10,000 types of nanomachines working. But there are one that is the most important for us: the ribosome. That molecule is the one that "construct" proteins from a DNA molecule. This proteins can be enzymes (useful for industry and medicine) or any other type of proteins.But this nanomachines are not like the machines we are used to see in the macroscopic universe. They are not ruled by the usual forces we know (gravity, inertia) as we are. The fact that they are a discrete number of atoms makes them to avoid the effects we know. So gravity can be considered non-existent, same for inertia or friction. But another forces are important, like thermal motion, that are really important in this scale. For example, every molecule inside a cell is supposed to interact in a single second with all of its neighbours. So they are continually being hit by another particles. That makes the structure of the molecules a really important feature.This machines works inside a water enviroment.

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