Rather than being aimed at solving a computing problem, Yurke says the tweezers were just a way of making a spontaneously assembling miniature tool.
Initially, this involved throwing lots of computing power at the problem.
By throwing more computing horsepower at the problem than ever before and comparing the simulation results with experimental observations of real protein behaviour, it should be possible to find out why it has failed in the past.
The obvious problem: in a computing era increasing dominated by mobile devices, consumers are printing less and less.
Scientists have tried to deal with the problem by using enormous computing power to sift systematically through billions of possible configurations.
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That's because the iPhone's severe design isn't about aesthetics: it's a solution to the very modern problem of how to combine computing, communications and mobility in a single device, says Mark Rolston, chief creative officer at Frog Design, which has worked on projects from Logitech devices to online services for Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ).
And cloud computing is the best way to begin attacking that problem.
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The problem Scala addresses is a fairly recent one in computing.
He said it was a problem that would get more acute as services move towards so called "cloud computing".
One of these was Wattminder, whose PVwizard product promises to use cloud computing to analyze data coming from solar panels to tell you when you when you have a problem with the panel and what might be the issue.
And while we're at it, the labour market survey shows starting salaries of new recruits rising at their fastest rate for three years - great news if you're a new recruit, but in current circumstances, it hints at a problem of skill shortages down the road, probably at their worst in IT and computing.
Simply put, severely compromised host environments, the emergence of a mobile, socially networked world and cloud computing have created a set of security requirements that can only be met by solving the malicious host problem.
This could be a problem, especially when servers running Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system offer industrial-strength computing for the first time.
Big Data has been a problem for businesses in the past because it's been expensive to store and because huge amounts of computing power are needed to analyse it to get anything useful from it.
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