Several big-dollar initiatives received NIH funding in late 2010
In the current economic climate, every research dollar counts. Fortunately, when it comes to biomedical computing, not everyone has been left counting change. Several big-dollar initiatives received...
Apr, 01, 2011
Computers and human experts duke it out over who is better at diagnosing disease, interpreting images, or predicting protein structure
Dorothy Rosenthal tenses over her microscope, peering at the problematic nucleus on the Pap smear yet again. “It’s abnormal,” she decides, and then hesitates. “No, it’s...
Jul, 01, 2006
There comes a tipping point in systems-biology studies of gene function where knowing some genes’ functions can, using a computational approach, help hone in on the functions of other genes....
Apr, 01, 2010
New approaches extend multiscale models to represent cellular mesoscales and bridge from molecular to cellular models
In an era of increasingly comprehensive molecular characterizations of living systems, computation has emerged as a key technology to facilitate integrative understanding of biological mechanisms....
Feb, 19, 2013
A myriad of environmental changes inspire only a handful of responses
Biologists’ favorite bacterium grows almost anywhere—from the human gut to the pounding surf. But E. coli’s remarkable adaptability apparently stems from being predictable rather...
Apr, 01, 2006
Synthetic biologists explain cell behaviors while desinging new ones
Without synchronized clocks—whether embedded in our body’s cells or programmed into our desktop computers—any kind of coordinated activity is impossible. So after synthetic...
Apr, 01, 2010
Public databases impact not only how research is done but what kind of research is done in the first place.
The setting: a scientific conference in January 2008. The speaker, Bruce Ponder, MD, PhD, an oncology professor at Cambridge University, is describing a previously unknown link between a particular...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
Simulations can teach us how young bodies and faces develop; how an artery compensates for decades of fatty plaque deposits by growing and thickening its walls; how tissue engineers can best coax endothelial cells to develop into organized sheets of skin for burn patients; and how cancerous tumors invade neighboring tissue.
For better or for worse, and on many levels, our tissues never stop growing and changing. While developing from childhood to old age, we grow not only bone, cartilage, fat, muscle and skin, but also...
Apr, 01, 2008
Profiles in Computer Science Courage Part I: Reflections on the rewards of plunging into biomedicine
Interviews with Leonidas Guibas, Ron Shamir, Michael Black, David Haussler, Daphne Koller, Erin Halperin, Gene Myers, Paul Groth and Bruce Donald
To a computer scientist, the fields of biology and medicine can seem like the vast Pacific Ocean, says Leonidas Guibas, PhD, professor of computer science at Stanford University. “You go to the...
Apr, 01, 2011
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