The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast.

Chemists have determined for the first time the crystal structure and unlocked the mechanism of activity of a family of enzymes that produce monensin, widely used as a cattle antibiotic.

The University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative awarded the monensin researchers supercomputer allocations on the Lonestar6 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to meet the challenges of modeling the binding sites of monensin. UTRC provides advanced computing capabilities to researchers across all 14 UT System institutions.

On the podcast is Lela Vukovic, an associate professor at The University of Texas, at El Paso. She performed the computational studies on the monensin research, published October 2023 in Nature Communications.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2024/02/12/supercomputing-the-secrets-inside-cattle-antibiotics/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast.

Scientists have created the world’s first working nanoscale electromotor, according to research published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The science team designed a turbine engineered from DNA that is powered by hydrodynamic flow inside a nanopore, a nanometer-sized hole in a membrane of solid-state silicon nitride.

The tiny motor could help spark research into future applications such as building molecular factories for useful chemicals or medical probes of molecules inside the bloodstream to detect diseases such as cancer.

On the podcast today is study co-author Aleksei Aksimentiev, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aksimentiev used TACC’s Frontera supercomputer to perform all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of the rotation of the DNA turbine.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2024/01/19/dna-origami-folded-into-tiny-motor/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast.

Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018.

Scientists have now used TACC’s Stampede2 and Lonestar5 supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more.

On the podcast is Pavana Kollipara, a recent UT Austin graduate who co-authored a study on optical tweezers published August 2023 in Nature Communications, written just before he completed his PhD in mechanical engineering under fellow study co-author Yuebing Zheng of UT Austin, the corresponding author of the paper.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/12/20/cosmic-lights-in-the-forest/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts a special podcast for the supercomputing conference SC23 in Denver, Colorado.

The popularity of artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in 2023, thanks in large part to ChatGPT, which has created a Sputnik moment for AI, and has grabbed public attention, headlines, and funding.

What’s less known is that decades of scientific supercomputing and high performance computing (HPC) laid the foundation for AI's moment. And now science codes have good reason to adapt and follow the technological trends AI leaves in its wake.

On the podcast to discuss scientific HPC and AI is Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC and project investigator of TACC’s largest supercomputers, Frontera, Stampede3, Lonestar6, and now Vista, TACC’s newest AI-focused system.

Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin.

Story Link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/11/13/scientific-supercomputing-and-ai/

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast.

Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018.

Scientists have now used TACC’s Stampede2 and Lonestar5 supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more.

On the podcast is Pavana Kollipara, a recent UT Austin graduate who co-authored a study on optical tweezers published August 2023 in Nature Communications, written just before he completed his PhD in mechanical engineering under fellow study co-author Yuebing Zheng of UT Austin, the corresponding author of the paper.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/10/31/new-twist-on-optical-tweezers/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast.

A planet about 950 light years from Earth could be the Looney Tunes’ Yosemite Sam equivalent of planets, blowing its atmospheric ‘top’ in spectacular fashion.

The planet called HAT-P-32b is losing so much of its atmospheric helium that the trailing gas tails are among the largest structures yet known of an exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system, according to observations by astronomers.

Three-dimensional simulations on the Stampede2 supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) helped model the flow of the planet’s atmosphere, based on data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope of The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory. The scientists hope to widen their planet-observing net and survey 20 additional star systems to find more planets losing their atmosphere and learn about their evolution.

On the podcast to talk more about his research and study on HAT-P-32b is Zhoujian Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/…er-blows-its-top/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

The key to understanding proteins — such as those that govern cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases — is quite simple - for scientists, anyway. Identify their chemical structure and find which other proteins can bind to them. But there’s a catch in that the search space for proteins is enormous.

For instance, a typical protein studied is made of 65 amino acids, and with 20 different amino acid choices at each binding position, there are 65 to the 20th power binding combinations, a number bigger than the estimated number of atoms there are in the universe.

Joining host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar on the podcast are Brian Coventry, a research scientist with the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Nathaniel Bennett, a post-doctoral scholar at the Institute for Protein Design.

Coventry and Bennett co-authored a study published May 2023 in the journal Nature Communications.

In it their team used deep learning methods on TACC’s Frontera supercomputer to augment existing energy-based physical models in ‘do novo’ or from-scratch computational protein design, resulting in a 10-fold increase in success rates verified in the lab for binding a designed protein with its target protein.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/08/03/deep-learning-for-new-protein-design/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Science writer Jorge Salazar of TACC hosts the podcast.

A dataset on seismic and tsunami hazards of a coastal Oregon town has received a 2023 DesignSafe Dataset award, given in recognition of the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research.

DesignSafe is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure that is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). It provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data for research to understand the impacts of natural hazards. TACC works with DesignSafe to provide cyberinfrastructure and software development.

On the podcast to talk about their award-winning research are Dan Cox, a professor in Civil Engineering; and Andre Barbosa, a professor in Structural Engineering, both at Oregon State University.

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/

Story link: www.designsafe-ci.org/community/news…-and-tsunamis/

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

A dataset on "plausible worst-case scenario" flooding in California has received a 2023 DesignSafe Dataset award, given in recognition of the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research.

DesignSafe is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure that is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) and provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data for research to understand the impacts of natural hazards. TACC works with DesignSafe to provide cyberinfrastructure and software development.

Joining host and TACC science writer Jorge Salazar on the podcast to talk about their award-winning research is Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast.

Scientists are using TACC’s Maverick2 supercomputer and data from the game Ebb and Flow by Lumosity to train deep learning models that mimic the human behavior of “task-switching,” shifting attention from one task to another.

This basic research is important for helping scientists understand cognitive control, which encompasses the basic mental processes that allow one to focus on the task at hand, but also flexibly disengage from the task if the need arises. These abilities are taxed by the game Ebb and Flow that the researchers studied.

The research may also inform the understanding of diseases in which patients exhibit deficits in cognitive control, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

A study that developed new and more realistic models of task-switching was published in Nature Human Behaviour in January 2023.

On the podcast to discuss the findings is Paul Jaffe, a postdoctoral fellow working with Professor Russell Poldrack in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

Supersized Science is part of the Texas Podcast Network – the conversations changing the world – brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts, and not of The University of Texas at Austin.

Story Link: https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2023/04/24/brain-games-reveal-clues-on-how-the-mind-works/

Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/