Ecce Homology is a physically interactive new-media work that visualizes genetic data as calligraphic forms.
A group of artists and scientists has created an interactive artwork using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), one of the foundational algorithms for comparative genomics. Normally, the BLAST...
Sep, 01, 2005
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
A pair of challenges increasingly threaten the success of bioinformatics research: convincing biologists to share their data and convincing computational colleagues to share their code. Many of us...
Jul, 01, 2006
How to share knowledge, data, tools, and computational resources in a sustainable manner
Once upon a time, a deep divide existed between scientists who did and those who did not have easy access to scientific content (journals, lectures, data), hardware (imaging devices, lab instruments...
Apr, 01, 2011
Explaining biocomputation to non-scientists can leave a person tongue-tied. Technical jargon gets in the way, and the breadth of the field resists encapsulation.
To help out, and to reach out...
Oct, 01, 2007
How errors in data, software, and methodology can teach us how to do better
In 2006, a paper in Nature Medicine suggested a novel and potentially revolutionary method for predicting patient responses to cancer therapies using gene signatures. The finding piqued the interest...
Sep, 01, 2011
A robot that develops hypotheses of its own
Robots already have a place in many labs, automating tedious tasks such as pipetting samples. But a new system designed at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom has taken laboratory automation...
Jul, 01, 2009
Keeping up with the literature is a challenge for all scientists. But some researchers are making it easier by enhancing the usability and understanding of an article’s contents in a variety of...
Jul, 01, 2009
AMOEBA's polarizable force field now integrated with OpenMM
Many have long hoped that molecular dynamics calculations—the computation of how molecules move and interact with other molecules—would revolutionize the world of synthetic chemistry,...
Sep, 01, 2011
Computation helps evaluate the nature of the NIH research portfolio in ways that were previously very difficult.
What biomedical research does the federal government fund? How is it allocated across important diseases? Has that changed over time? Answering these questions at any level of detail is tougher than...
Jun, 08, 2012