Abdul Binmahfuth's Personal Blog

In previous posts , I briefly introduced the world of synthetic biology and designing of genetic circuits. The goal of competition such as iGEM is to encourage people designing creative solutions to real-world problems using synthetic biology with the hope of moving the field out of academia into industry, much like electronics. And much like electronics, iGEM is trying to develop a library of biological parts, analogous to electronic parts such as capacitors and resistors to build any circuit. If you have ever dabbled in electronics, you'd notice that not parts are created equally; Some capacitors have higher efficiencies than others which might suit a certain application more. In this post, I want to explore one of the most important "biological parts" in my opinion:   What are promoters Promoters are regions of DNA usually found upstream of a gene that act as a switch to express whatever gene is downstream of it. Since translating DNA to mRNA requires the help of RNA ...

  Why material science? Since material names are used to define periods of civilisations of the past (Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc ...), material science is considered, in my opinion, one of the species-defining endeavours. Civilizations that mastered smelting iron ended up victorious. All of a sudden, enemies had to deal with stronger swords and implantable shields. The same applies today, countries that managed to master silicon chip manufacturing ended up economically victorious. With the advent of biotechnology, largely with the help of artificial intelligence tools such as AlphaFold, there could be a promise of a new class of materials that are grown instead of manufactured. Bio-composite materials offer an alternative solution to create materials inspired by nature and can returned to it at the end of their lifespan. Such materials will tremendously accelerate reaching our sustainability goals. Mycelium Composites One such material is mycelium, which is considered nature's solu...

Image 1: Mdjourney generated picture using the prompt: "cartoon of human soldiers fighting a small robot. it shows the defeated robot in the middle and human soldiers aiming their rifles at the robot" "We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!" ' ― Minister-companion of the Jihad. [6] That quote will be recognizable if you have read Dune by Frank Herbert . I found it suitable to bring the novel up during the extreme mixture of excitement and fear among people given the recent advance in artificial intelligence. Even an open letter was signed by many extremely influential people to halt the progress of artificial intelligence research to avoid a situation like in the cartoon above in image 1 (which is ironically AI ...

If you are remotely interested in mathematics, you'd probably heard of Fourier, or Joseph Fourier . His name comes to mind whenever a physicist, electronic engineer or any technical person deals with frequencies . I don't need to praise Fourier anymore because there are tons of videos and articles about him all over the internet.  In this article, I will be talking about Fourier series and epicycles (Foucycle), seemingly two distinct branches of mathematics if you're unaware of Euler's famous formula . Epicycles are essentially circles within circles, they have been studied extensively by astronomers because it was thought planets' motion was perfectly circular (Not to mention how they were convinced the earth was the centre of the universe) until the inverse-square law of planet motion was introduced by Keppler and Newton . Fourier series is essentially a way to approximate any function as the infinite sum of scaled sins and cosines, simple yet revolutionary. ...

Communicating information is perhaps the highlight of the 21st century; the obvious example is the boom in internet and smartphone use in the last 20 years or so; everything is well connected and messages get sent within a fraction of a second. A less obvious example of communicating information is through reading information stored in physical object prone to damage. For example, a CD could be scratched slightly but still, all the relevant information can be recovered properly.  How did we arrive at such a resilient communication? Let's take communicating with your partner as  an example. Without sounding too much like a family consultant, the key here is to send your message as clearly as possible to avoid misunderstanding. Let's say you are an intelligent being who can formulate a proper and grammatically correct sentence, and you wanted to say "I want pizza". You could say the sentence face to face, and hopefully, your crave for pizza would be communicate...

 Different people play chess in different styles, no one knows the best way yet. This guide is perhaps useful to computers more than humans, although feel free to take a piece of life-long advice from this article on human behaviour. Source:  https://ar.casact.org/actuaries-versus-artificial-intelligence-what-do-actuaries-do-what-will-they-do/ The participants of this study are merely two chess programs I wrote. With the best of my abilities, I tried to give them some sort of personality that is reflected in their style of play. To understand how to create a "personality" in a program, it is helpful to understand the most common algorithms used in chess. Broadly speaking, designing a chess engine involves two parts: The Risk Assessment part and The Search part. For the latter, there is a pretty standard and efficient algorithm that searches for the best piece to move called the minimax. Thus I won't be altering the search algorithm much. I will, however, alter the risk as...