Mouse hair development patterns follow Turing's predictions
In the 1950s, computer science pioneer Alan Turing suggested an elegantly simple mechanism for how biological patterns such as scales, feathers, and hair might form. Now, more than fifty years later...
Apr, 01, 2007
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
Principal component analysis of gene expression signatures may help determine prognosis
Researchers have long speculated that many of the genetic programs responsible for rapid growth of tumors are also important for the growth that occurs during normal embryonic development.
Now...
Oct, 01, 2010
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
Many a successful investigator working at the interface between molecular biology, genetics and computation will recognize the imperative to obtain biological validation for computational...
Jul, 01, 2008
Advances in computational power and algorithms have led to longer and more accurate molecular dynamics simulations of protein folding. But these approaches, because they are computationally intensive...
Jun, 06, 2012
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
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
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
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