Pendulum (band)

Pendulum is an Australian-born English drum and bass and electronic rock band founded in 2002. Pendulum originally formed in the Australian city of Perth, Western Australia by Rob Swire, Gareth McGrillen, and Paul Harding. Rob and Gareth also constitute the electro house duo Knife Party (the original Australian members). The group was notable for a distinctive sound, mixing hard rock with electronic music, and developing to cover a wider range of genres. Swire and McGrillen were members of the metal band known as Xygen. After hearing Konflict's "Messiah" at a club, they were inspired to enter into the Drum & Bass genre. They founded Pendulum with Paul Harding, who was a veteran DJ in the Drum & Bass scene. In 2003 the band relocated to the United Kingdom. While Hold Your Colour holds true to the Drum & Bass genre, Pendulum have since experimented with mixing other genres into their work, as can be heard on In Silico and Immersion. In August 2013, Swire announced that a new album may be released "some time next year" (2014), although Swire and McGrillen later confessed on their Reddit AMA that they had become disillusioned with Pendulum and have no interest at present in producing any new material. Despite this, on December 16, 2015, Pendulum were confirmed to be reuniting to perform at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida, marking their official return as a live band.

Pendulum

A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position. When released, the restoring force combined with the pendulum's mass causes it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. The time for one complete cycle, a left swing and a right swing, is called the period. The period depends on the length of the pendulum, and also to a slight degree on the amplitude, the width of the pendulum's swing.

From its examination in around 1602 by Galileo Galilei, the regular motion of pendulums was used for timekeeping, and was the world's most accurate timekeeping technology until the 1930s. Pendulums are used to regulate pendulum clocks, and are used in scientific instruments such as accelerometers and seismometers. Historically they were used as gravimeters to measure the acceleration of gravity in geophysical surveys, and even as a standard of length. The word "pendulum" is new Latin, from the Latin pendulus, meaning 'hanging'.

In silico

In silico (literally Latin for "in silicon", alluding to the mass use of silicon for semiconductor computer chips) is an expression used to mean "performed on computer or via computer simulation." The phrase was coined in 1989 as an allusion to the Latin phrases in vivo, in vitro, and in situ, which are commonly used in biology (see also systems biology) and refer to experiments done in living organisms, outside of living organisms, and where they are found in nature, respectively.

Drug discovery with virtual screening

In silico study in medicine is thought to have the potential to speed the rate of discovery while reducing the need for expensive lab work and clinical trials. One way to achieve this is by producing and screening drug candidates more effectively. In 2010, for example, using the protein docking algorithm EADock (see Protein-ligand docking), researchers found potential inhibitors to an enzyme associated with cancer activity in silico. Fifty percent of the molecules were later shown to be active inhibitors in vitro. This approach differs from use of expensive high-throughput screening (HTS) robotic labs to physically test thousands of diverse compounds a day often with an expected hit rate on the order of 1% or less with still fewer expected to be real leads following further testing (see drug discovery).