The Enchilada

Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)

United States legislation took a step into the future in 2011 by passing the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FSMA shifts the focus from a after-the-fact  reactionary approach to a preventive approach. One might not expect it but the toll exacted by foodborne diseases is large. 1 in 6 people in the United States (that’s 48 million people) suffer from foodborne diseases each year. Thousands die and these deaths are needless. The shift to prevention is timely. What the FSMA does is to make food companies responsible for monitoring and preventing contamination.

Food companies will now need a

Infinite circle series

Here’s a fascinating puzzle by Presh Talwalker. Given an isoceles triangle and an infinite series of circles fit within the triangle as depicted below, what is the sum of circumferences of all the circles? Think about it and when you are ready for answer, read on. Draw a line down the center of the triangle and through all the circles. This line is the sum of diameters of all the circles and is given by the Pythagoras Theorem. The sum of circumferences is therefore: The puzzle ends here but an even cooler result is implied by the above. If you

WIRED cites Entopsis in the context of IoT

Scott Amyx from WIRED Magazine just wrote a fascinating article on the intersection between AI (Artificial Intelligence) and various data-driven technologies. He asked the intriguing question: ‘Could NuTec glasses be equipped with IoT sensors to optically scan and transmit signature data to the cloud remotely?’ This is precisely something we would like to see happen in the future and we are working on an image acquisition framework that will make this a reality.

Request for Proposals

Hi all! We at Entopsis have been busy working on our production capabilities and are pleased to announce that we have a scalable process for printing NuTecs. We are now switching gears and very excited at the prospect of focusing on assay development. The whole purpose of Entopsis is the democratization of health and for this reason, we are putting out a Request for Proposals. We welcome scientists at all levels to write to us and tell us what assays you would like to develop using our platform. We want to develop these assays in partnership with you.

Duration of urination

An Elephant, a Dog and an Ass,
Tried to see who would pee the fastest,
On the referee’s go,
All three unleashed their flow,
And learnt: Pee time is constant over mass*.

*assuming mass > 3 kg The first sentence of this paper reads: “We filmed the urination of 16 animals and obtained 28 videos of urination from YouTube, listed in SI Appendix. Movies S1–S4 show that urination style is strongly dependent on animal size.” http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/11932.full

Mystery Angels

An interesting story hit the news yesterday about three mysterious individuals at an obscure quant fund who secretly gave away billions of dollars to fund research into diseases such as Huntington’s disease. What they are doing is admirable, not just in terms of leaving a tremendous impact on science but also the manner in which they have gone about their philanthropy, quietly and without fanfare. A legend has grown around the campus of their quant fund, which apparently hires Ph.D.s and computer programmers. One sample interview question was given as: “For any prime number larger than 3, prove that

Q&A game

Today, some of us were playing a game. Everyone contributed to the creation of a bank of questions which included “What kind of music do you like to listen to?” and “What is the strangest thing that you have eaten?”. A script was created to draw from a total of 72 unique questions at random with replacement and no option would be given to pass on questions. The idea was that we would take turns on our birthdays to answer these questions in an up close and personal session. Of course, there was the issue of how many questions one should

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