Microbes react to environmental changes before they occur.
When we see dark clouds, we might grab an umbrella before heading outside. We’ve long believed that showing such foresight requires a brain and complex information-processing capability...
Oct, 01, 2008
T-Rex in the Slow Lane
by Kristen Cobb
Tyrannosaurus rex is often pictured baring its teeth, crouching, and running swiftly after its prey, but these images are largely based on human fancy...
Jan, 01, 2006
The fittest organisms survive and produce offspring, according to the Darwinian theory of natural selection. And the changes that make an organism fit happen at the molecular level: when genes mutate...
Oct, 01, 2007
For major team-based Roadmap initiatives, National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials expect grantees to look beyond the focus of their individual projects to build bridges not only among funded...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
Collaborations are a fact of life for interdisciplinary fields like biomedical computing, and social scientists can help researchers understand how to make them more productive
Social scientists who study science have noticed a trend: More and more researchers are collaborating. Over the last twenty years, the number of co-authored papers has increased in every scientific...
Jul, 01, 2008
Computational simulations of life in motion at every scale—molecular, cellular, tissue-level, and whole organism—are boosting our understanding of the role mechanics plays in controlling life.
From atoms and molecules to insects, dinosaurs, and humans, computational researchers are finding that much of life can be understood in mechanical terms. Indeed, the machines of life are...
Jan, 01, 2008
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
There is growing recognition that epigenetics may be just as important as genetics in human health and disease.
In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck explained evolution as the inheritance of acquired traits; he believed that changes due to behaviors and exposures in one generation could be passed...
Jun, 01, 2010
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