Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Spring 2012 Meeting of the APS Ohio-Region Section
Volume 57, Number 4
Friday–Saturday, April 13–14, 2012; Columbus, Ohio
Session G1: Biophysics |
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Chair: R. Sooryakumar, Ohio State University Room: Physics Research Building Smith Seminar Room |
Saturday, April 14, 2012 9:00AM - 9:12AM |
G1.00001: The neurophysical basis of mind and consciousness James Beichler A living body is just a complex pattern of energetic particle exchanges to physicists when compared to the biochemical processes studied by chemists and biologists. New research has centered more upon the electric, magnetic and electromagnetic characteristics of life. It is easy to model mind and consciousness as the electric and magnetic counterparts of living organisms. Mind is an extremely complex electric scalar field pattern and consciousness is the corresponding magnetic vector potential field pattern. As humans, we may have the most complex and advanced mind and consciousness known, but all living organisms display mind and consciousness at various lower levels than our human mind and consciousness. Mind and consciousness have mistakenly become associated with the brain and no other part of the body because of the dense concentration of neurons in the brain. A strict study of the magnetic vector potential field patterns associated with neural microtubules, neurons and neural nets demonstrates how thoughts and streams of thought originate in the brain and are stored magnetically. Microtubules, which act as magnetic induction coils, are the primary structural bio-unit used for building, storing and retrieving memories in the mind. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 14, 2012 9:12AM - 9:24AM |
G1.00002: Energy landscapes for a homopolymer protein-like folding transition Mark Taylor, Wolfgang Paul, Kurt Binder Many small proteins fold via a first-order ``all-or-none'' transition directly from an expanded coil to a compact native state. We recently reported an analogous direct freezing transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a simple flexible homopolymer [1]. Wang-Landau sampling was used to construct the 1D density of states for square-well chains up to length 256. Analysis within both the micro-canonical and canonical ensembles shows that, for a chain with sufficiently short-range interactions, the usual polymer collapse transition is preempted by a direct freezing transition. A 2D configurational probability landscape, built via subsequent multi-canonical sampling, reveals both a dominant folding pathway and an inherent configurational barrier to folding. Despite the non-unique homopolymer ground state, the thermodynamics of this direct freezing transition are identical to the thermodynamics of two-state protein folding. A free energy barrier separates a high entropy ensemble of unfolded states from a low entropy set of crystallite states and the transition proceeds via the formation of a transition-state folding nucleus.\\[4pt] [1] Phys. Rev. E 79, 050801(R) (2009); J. Chem. Phys. 131, 114907 (2009). [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 14, 2012 9:24AM - 9:36AM |
G1.00003: What do numerical sleep models say about ``nontraditional'' sleep schedules? Cavendish McKay The human sleep system can be modeled by the interaction of an oscillating process and a saturating process. Although this two process model was developed to explain natural (unforced) sleep regulation, it can also be used to examine the feasibility of an externally imposed sleep schedule. Results will be shown for a variety of potential schedules, ranging from the typical (a single 8 hour block of sleep at night) to the radical (sleep taken in small chunks throughout the day). [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 14, 2012 9:36AM - 9:48AM |
G1.00004: Effects of Passivation on Charge Transport in DNA-CTMA and P3HT Thin Films Using the Time of Flight (TOF) Technique Timothy Gorman, Perry Yaney, Fahima Ouchen TOF measurements were carried out on a variety of thin films of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of MW $\sim $ 200 kDa with and without hexacetyltrimethl-ammonium chloride (CTMA) along with thin films of regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene (P3HT) with and without passivation in room air. A 20 ns, pulsed Nd:YAG laser with doubled output at 532 nm was used for P3HT and quadrupled output at 266 nm was used for DNA to inject charge carriers to produce a photoconduction transient with an applied electric field. Charge mobilities are derived from these transients. Without any passivation, photoconductive response signals were seen to change shape and decay in amplitude by factors of more than three with exposure to room air for both P3HT and DNA-CTMA. It was found that thin layers of polyurethane gave some degree of passivation to the DNA devices to preserve the photoconductive signals. A glass cover sealed over devices using Norland Products UVS 91 solvent-free epoxy was found to successfully passivate P3HT devices on a glass slide, which produced consistent signals in room air over the span of days. [Preview Abstract] |
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