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
Researchers examine the connection between editorial boards of medical informatics and bioinformatics journals
How ideas spread gets at the very fabric of scholarly research and has been studied from many different angles.
Many studies examine person-to-person connectivity in social networks. Within a...
Jul, 01, 2007
The National Institutes of Health are on a mission: To understand and tackle the problems of human health. To make that daunting problem approachable, 15 of the 20 institutes divvy up human health...
Oct, 05, 2012
Modelers should take the lead.
Many collaborators 1 with whom modelers2 work have little or no training in modeling3 and so it is natural that they may be cautious,...
Jun, 05, 2012
The study of HIV evolution is not only critical to fighting the virus; it has also driven advances in the computational tools used to study evolution in general.
When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it would be decades before HIV would jump from monkeys to humans and set off a devastating worldwide pandemic. But evolution is at the heart of...
Jul, 01, 2009
When people sit peacefully at rest, doing and thinking nothing in particular, their brains still buzz merrily along. In scans called functional MRIs, they light up in characteristic patterns. No one...
Oct, 01, 2007
Capturing meaning in functional MRI
Thinking of a noun—a peach, train, or bird, for example—activates specific parts of the brain. Now, scientists have trained a computer to predict such activation patterns. The...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
Even when we simply stand still on two feet, our brains communicate with our muscles—firing them appropriately to keep us upright against gravity. So when scientists simulate simple or complex...
Jun, 06, 2012
One of the major obstacles to studying the human brain has always been gaining access. Until relatively recently, almost all of what we knew about the brain was obtained through post-mortem ...
Apr, 01, 2008