Supercomputers open up new horizons, offering the possibility of discovering new ways to understand life’s complexity
Their very names sound like dinosaurs. Teracomputers. Petacomputers. These are, in fact, the dinosaurs of the digital world—monstrous, hungry and powerful. But unlike the extinct...
Oct, 01, 2006
A debate
Say you are performing biomolecular investigations that are extremely compute intensive. You have a finite amount of money and time. You could get (1) a supercomputer (fast custom CPUs and high-speed...
Oct, 01, 2009
Ecce Homology is a physically interactive new-media work that visualizes genetic data as calligraphic forms.
A group of artists and scientists has created an interactive artwork using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), one of the foundational algorithms for comparative genomics. Normally, the BLAST...
Sep, 01, 2005
Bringing models closer to reality
When the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia launched on January 16, 2003, a large piece of foam fell off and hit the left wing. Alerted of the impact, NASA engineers used a computer model to predict...
Oct, 19, 2012
Words of Advice from the Scientists Featured in Profiles in Computer Science Courage
Find Your Passion
“Not every computer scientist will fall in love with the field like I did,...
Apr, 01, 2011
Balancing Breadth and Depth
The last decade saw a proliferation of training programs at the intersection of life science and computation, with more than 60 new degree and certificate programs launched in the United States alone...
Sep, 01, 2005
Computer vision program rivals the human ability to rapidly recognize objects in a complex picture
Our brains can recognize most of the things we pass on an evening stroll: Cars, buildings, trees, and people all register even at a great distance or from an odd angle. Now, a new computer vision...
Jul, 01, 2007
“The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.”—...
Jan, 01, 2006
Watching the beginning of the infection process in the longest and biggest virus simulation to date.
After a satellite tobacco necrosis virus particle infects a cell, it sheds the calcium ions that hold the capsid proteins together. Next, the proteins start to repel each other, the capsid swells and...
Jun, 06, 2012
Plot shows how functional communities in yeast protein interaction networks change in size and nature at different levels of resolution
Splashes of bold color seem to drip down the page, bringing to mind the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Spurred by the beauty of the image she had created, Anna Lewis,* a graduate student studying...
Apr, 01, 2011
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