It's something that hasn't been done, and that's what makes it exciting. "It's fun because we're building a new field. "We're building circuits that are hybrids between biology and technology," Weiss says. Down the road, everything from DNA, to pharmaceuticals, to cancer biomarkers could be incorporated into similar biological transistors. The researchers plan to use this technique to study many other molecules. The findings were just published in the journal Science. That signal was like "a microphone that allowed us to listen in on the enzyme's activity," Collins says. Pac-Man (game) Sue first appeared alongside Blinky, Pinky, and Inky in Ms. Sue ( Suu) is a female ghost from the Pac-Man series, commonly shown as being purple (but is orange in some other appearances). When the molecule sprang into action, each chomp of its jaws produced a blip of electrical activity, like the dit-dit-dit of a telegraph. For the Pac-Person of the same name, see Sue (Pac-Man World 2). Then they passed an electric current along the tube, essentially turning the molecule into a very tiny transistor. The team attached a lysozyme molecule to a nanotube, using an amino acid as a tether. And to do that, they relied on some very tiny technology: carbon nanotubes. But in order to study their motion up close, the researchers had to keep one of the molecules still. "This tells us that the enzyme opens huge, gaping holes in the bacteria, which cause the bacteria to explode," Weiss says.Įach tear you shed contains an army of these enzymatic Pac-Men, ready to chase down and gobble up germs before they infect the sensitive tissues around your eye. "The enzyme opens and closes almost like a Pac-Man mouth as it chomps away," Collins says, which means it can chew through bacterial cell walls as easily as scissors slice through paper. How is that possible? Well, each molecule is essentially a set of voracious jaws that latches on to microbial invaders, starts chewing and doesn't let go. "What we've shown is that just one molecule of enzyme is enough." "People had always wondered, did 100 molecules gang up and attack a bacterium?" says Philip Collins, a physics professor at Irvine who joined the interdisciplinary research team. Weiss is co-author of a paper on a modern-day bodacious experiment that for the first time reveals details of how lysozyme works. "That's a seriously bodacious experiment," Gregory Weiss, professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Irvine, tells Shots. He collected and crystallized lysozyme from his own tears, then wowed contemporaries at Britain's Royal Society by demonstrating its miraculous power to dissolve bacteria before their very eyes. In 1922, a few years before he won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered in human tears a germ-fighting enzyme which he named lysozyme. So it may surprise you to hear that tears really are pretty powerful, on the microbial level at least. The mystical healing properties of tears are invoked in fairy tales and fantasies from Rapunzel to Harry Potter. You know, without actually needing any quarters.Tears contain an enzyme that eats bacteria the way Pac-Man eats Power Pellets. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. To play the game, go to during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds. Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun. One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets and-of course-free games! When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician.
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