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
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
Biomechanical models contribute to a better understanding of both the normal and the diseased eye.
Squint, and you can almost make out that bird soaring over the horizon. But determining whether it’s a hawk or a raven will be nearly impossible for someone with myopia, also known as...
Feb, 19, 2013
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
Six startups jockey for a place at the table. Who will succeed?
A handful of startups are wagering that genome interpretation is the next big thing.
Why is this business space so hot? “Once you can produce a better faster genome, thanks...
Jun, 20, 2013
How to deal with too many dimensions and too few samples.
Noninvasive experimental techniques, such as magnetic resonance (MR), infrared, Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy, and more recently, mass spectroscopy (proteomics) and microarrays (genomics) have...
Sep, 01, 2005
Models of healthy and diseased lipid profiles could prove valuable diagnostically.
When it comes to heart disease risk, “bad” and “good” cholesterol—also known as low density lipoproteins [LDL] and high density lipoproteins [HDL]—do not tell...
Oct, 01, 2008
Simulations illuminate the inner workings of blood at multiple levels
Understanding blood flow and coagulation is crucial to treating blood disorders such as hemophilia and thrombosis, and to dealing with diseases such as AIDS, malaria, and diabetes that have...
Jun, 07, 2012
A newly created molecular computer works in human cells and offers the flexibility of a general-purpose circuit. The advance, described in Nature Biotechnology in May, brings closer the eventual...
Oct, 01, 2007