Articles — Project / Lab Report

his project is part of the FlowNet initiative. FlowNet aims at providing Internet freedom and free flow information through socially informed, censor resistant online social networks. My contribution for FLowNet is in devel- oping an Android application, SecurePost. The requirement for SecurePost is two-fold. First, the system should facilitate secure, anonymous, group communication within a closed group of trusted members. Second, the general public on the Internet viewing this content, should be able to verify that the content was generated only by the said closed group of trusted members. The system consists of an Android client application, a proxy server and a browser-plugin. The OSNs supported by this system are Twitter and Facebook.

Bacterial cells can have DNA damage due to transcriptional error, or through the effect of an antibiotic. The SOS response is a bacterial cell program for coping with DNA damage, in which the cell cycle is arrested, and DNA repair is induced. The repairs have high probability in leading to mutagenesis in the bacteria, which can lead to antibiotic resistance. The RecA protein in bacteria is responsible for the activation of the SOS response; therefore, making it a target for inhibition. I elected to use the ubiquitination system, natively used for apoptosis, as a means of targeted degradation of the RecA protein in bacteria prone to mutations. Polyubiquitination of misfolded proteins leads to the breaking down of the protein with the aid of proteasomes, which break down unnecessary proteins through a chemical reaction known as proteolysis. Using random forest-predictors, I determined a statistically high likelihood of ubiquitination of the RecA protein in MRSA, Tuberculosis, and other high risk bacterial infections. I hypothesized that I could foster ubiquitin-tagging on RecA by forcing the protein to misfold. Chaperones are proteins which interact with each other to prevent specific sets of proteins from misfolding. CHIP (C terminus of HSC70-Interacting Protein) is a biomolecule that inhibits interactions between the chaperones of RecA. Adding CHIP, ubiquitin, and 26s proteasomes into the bacterial system, should theoretically lead to the degradation of the RecA protein inside the bacteria. I tested my hypothesis by conducting an assay for monitoring CHIP-mediated ubiquitination, and conducted analysis on the assay using SDS- Page gel electrophoresis, and Western-blotting. The resulting data showed signs of polyubiquitination on the RecA protein, with chains of five or more ubiquitin, showing high drug potential. Adding an antibody drug conjugate, containing all the necessary components of a CHIP-mediated ubiquitination reaction, to common antibiotics can lead to the inhibition of bacterial mutagenesis, and higher antibiotic drug potency.

This report provides insight into the magnetic phenomenon of Hysteresis. Hysteresis is defined as a retardation effect where the magnetisation of a magnetic material lags behind the magnetizing force. Here we will explore the hysteresis loop for a silver steel ferromagnet and use this to discover it’s magnetic properties. The method used will be to place a ferromagnet inside a solenoid with an alternating voltage which will continually reverse the magnetic field and magnetism direction. The relation between these two quantities will be used to produce a hysteresis loop from which magnetic properties can be deduced. The results obtained were: saturation magnetisation = (8.4±0.5)(105)Am-1; remnant magnetisation = (5.9±0.5)(105)Am-1; coercive field: (4.3±0.5)(104)Am-1; energy expended per cycle per unit volume of material: (1.55±0.05)(103)Jm-3s-1; energy product: (8.7±3.0)(104)Jm-3.

Template for students in physics at Reykjavik University.

This research paper aims at exploiting efficient ways of implementing the N-Body problem. The N-Body problem, in the field of physics, predicts the movements and planets and their gravitational interactions. In this paper, the efficient execution of heavy computational work through usage of different cores in CPU and GPU is looked into; achieved by integrating the OpenMP parallelization API and the Nvidia CUDA into the code. The paper also aims at performance analysis of various algorithms used to solve the same problem. This research not only aids as an alternative to complex simulations but also for bigger data that requires work distribution and computationally expensive procedures.

FFT of various syntetic and real signals

ХН-41 (Industrial production of methanol)

The purpose of this project was to design a noninvasive pulse rate meter. The design team decided to create a four-stage system for identifying the pulse using optical sensors. The first stage is the input, where an infrared LED shines light at a patient's finger while a photodiode receives light on the other end. The change in blood volume in the patient's finger changes the light in the patient's finger, which creates a current across the photodiode. The second stage is the current-to-voltage converter, whereby the current created by the change in light levels effects a change in voltage. This voltage is passed to the third stage, which is filtering, which attenuates the low-frequency DC offset as well as the high-frequency noise. The final stage is amplification, whereby the filtered signal is amplified so that it may be read by other means, such as a microcontroller.

Relatório lab 7,8,9