Computer Wielding Microbes!

Original Due Date for Blog #11 was 4/9/2014

Blog re due #1

Microbes are Computer Geniuses? 

In this article I think the man idea comes across very effectively and immediately made me want to read the whole article.

Nikhil Swaminathan, author of the article, researched how microorganisms can be used I ways we can’t even imagine. They can be used as computer harboring problem solvers. In a study done in North Carolina a biologist named Karmella Haynes successfully transplanted a silicon-based electronic machine that allows the microbes to solve intense mathematical problems that humans cannot. Theses problems entail things such as the “burned pancake problem”. It’s a puzzle about how to properly stack different flapjacks that are burned on one side and the perfectly cooked ones on the other. Using the fewest number of flips possible to not only arrange them so that the largest are at the bottom but to where they are golden side up. By showing a computer that can solve problems as this, could they be used to detect changes in live systems like cancer in the body or the spread of contaminants in a lake? Some researchers in Missouri Western State University inserted DNA plasmids in a single-celled organism called Escherichia Coli, ones that can cause food poisoning. They modeled a two pancake flip into two segments at random, and also added the Salmonella bacterium that is capable of flipping genetic fragments. The organisms were given a certain amount of time to see if they could complete the task in a fast manner. Only the ones with proper segment orientation survived. With this the researchers could tell which cells had correctly solved the problem because the ones who couldn’t have died.

For me I think hat everything that was said was addressed in a way that is very comprehensive. You don’t have to look things up to understand them, because the answers are all around in the text itself.

Some rhetorical concepts shown are in ethos and pathos. It’s shown through ethos because the author wrote everything in a way we can trust what he is telling us. He used reasonable resources to tell us how microorganisms can be used to solve problems we simply cannot do on our own. It has pathos because everything that is being said is connecting to the readers in an emotional level. By going about how we can’t solve these problems ourselves, seeking answers to something we can’t even see without the proper technology. It just shows how even we as humans need help from things that are “insignificant” to us.

This selection was very biased since it did only talk about one topic throughout the whole article, but I think it was very effective and proved its point!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-computer-puts-microbe/