Integrated Calendar

Despite its extraordinary complexity and diversity, many of Life's most fundamental and complex phenomena scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion. For example, metabolic rate scales approximately as the 3/4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude from complex molecules up to the largest multicellular organisms. Similarly, time-scales (such as lifespans and growth-rates) and sizes (such as genome lengths, RNA densities, and tree heights) scale as power laws with exponents which are typically simple multiples of 1/4. This universality and simplicity suggests that fundamental constraints underly much of the coarse-grained generic structure and organisation of living systems. It will be shown how these 1/4 power scaling laws follow from underlying principles embedded in the dynamics and geometry of space-filling, fractal-like, branching networks, presumed optimised by natural selection. These ideas lead to a general quantitative, predictive framework that potentially captures many essential features of diverse biological systems. Examples will include vascular systems, growth, cancer, aging and mortality, sleep, cell size, and evolutionary rates. These ideas will be extended to social organisations: to what extent are cities or corporations "just" very large organisms? Analogous scaling laws reflecting underlying social network structures point to general principles of organization common to all cities, but, counter to biology, the pace of social life systematically increases with size. This has dramatic implications for growth, development and sustainability: innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.

Protein structure prediction is still, after many decades of research, one of the main unsolved problems in computational biology. The potential impact of having accurate models of the structure of proteins is enormous, e.g. new medicines, better crops and, in general, a better insight into life's inner workings.
In this presentation we show our work in modelling the structure of proteins using a variety of topological graphs. We also show that using data mining algorithms, it is feasible to predict some properties of these graphs based on the primary sequence of a protein. Furthermore, we will show how these topological predicted features can enhance the prediction of proteins' contact maps with good accuracy (as assessed in the last edition of the CASP competition).

Nuclear energy is the main candidate to supply the future world energy demand which is estimated to grow by a factor of about 3 within the next 50 years. For the last 50 years nuclear fusion is known to be the ultimate desired clean and unlimited energy source of the future. However, till now none of the approaches to achieve controlled nuclear fusion energy had reached the scientific demonstration stage.
The talk will mainly review the status of the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) approach. In this approach a spherical target is irradiated directly by overlapped laser beams to achieve high compression of the fuel and high temperature of the hot spot to trigger ignition and achieve maximum energy gain from the thermonuclear burn. The baseline direct-drive ignition target design for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), recently build at LLNL (Livermore, CA), uses cryogenic deuterium–tritium (DT) shells imploded with a total energy up to 1.5 MJ. Achieving a significant energy gain (~40-50) will require a total target areal densities R), at peak compression, of ~1500 mg/cm2.
The recent experimental research campaign on OMEGA, a 60-beam, 351-nm laser with total energy up to 30kJ, located at the LLE (University of Rochester, NY), will be describe. The main goal of that research is to demonstrate that high compression (i.e. high R) can be achieved in cryogenic D2 and DT implosions. Since R is proportional to EL1/3 (EL is the laser energy), the peak areal density of 1500mg/cm2 at NIF energies (EL=1.5MJ) can be scaled down to ~300mg/cm2 for OMEGA-size targets (EL~30kJ). The main scientific milestones of the last 10 years cryogenic targets implosion campaign, starting from implosions that results in a very large areal-density reduction (about a factor of 2) from the simulation predicted values and ending with a successful, world record high and close to the predicted values areal-density, will be describe.