Eric Drexler at Metamodern has a post about molecular modeling and systems engineering -- and the great potential these hold. "The state of the art in molecular fabrication would enable us to build amazing nanosystems, if only we could design them," he writes. "Rich opportunities are emerging from the convergence of protein engineering, structural DNA nanotechnology, and the advances that have in recent years produced a vast range of nanoscale, non-biomolecular components. ... The challenge is to put it all together, and for self-assembling systems, this task reduces to the problem of designing the parts." If this is up your alley, don't miss the part about when a model is considered "good enough."
At bbgm, Deepak Singh blogs a response to Drexler's essay. "Things that jumped out at me include the funnel from high throughput to high quality, an open extensible design exploration framework, extensible force fields, physics-based energy functions, coarse-grained models, and integration with finer grained models," he writes. "Multi-scale modeling is the holy grail of molecular modeling and simulation in my mind."