Aldose to Hydantoin: US$ 50,000 prize

Protecting-Group Free Derivitization of Aldose to Hydantoin


https://gw.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9567247?campaign=nature

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer

People exert large amounts of problem-solving effort playing computer
games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been
successfully ‘crowd-sourced’ through games1–3, but it is not clear if
more complex scientific problems can be solved with humandirected
computing. Protein structure prediction is one such
problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation
of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the
very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a
multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving
hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein
structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly
versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction
methodology4, while they compete and collaborate to optimize
the computed energy. We show that top-ranked Foldit players
excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in
which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to
achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working
collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and
algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not
only the conformational space but also the space of possible search
strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and
strategy development capabilities with traditional computational
algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful
new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific
problems.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7307/edsumm/e100805-10.html

http://www.youtube.com/user/NatureVideoChannel

Column: In the pipeline

Derek Lowe reminisces about lost laboratory techniques and wonders which will be next to go.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/August/ColumnInpipeline.asp