Can the complexities of biology be boiled down to Amazon.com-style recommendations? The examples here suggest possible pathways to an intelligent healthcare system with big data at its core.
“We have recommendations for you,” announces the website Amazon.com each time a customer signs in.
This mega-retailer analyzes billions of customers’ purchases—nearly $...
Jan, 02, 2012
For a century, neuroscientists have dissected, traced, eavesdropped on, and are now compiling a seemingly endless cast of players in the nervous system. As we keep gathering more and more molecular...
Apr, 01, 2009
OpenSim 2.0 promises greater opportunities for customization
With its initial release two years ago, OpenSim offered researchers a powerful open-source application for simulating movement. Simple enough to be used by high school students yet advanced enough to...
Jan, 01, 2010
Using software designed for stress testing in engineering, researchers have modeled an American sabercat's skull in the highest resolution vertebrate animal model to date.
Wildlife biologists can watch a lion stalk its prey, but paleontologists must examine fossils to understand how the extinct saber-toothed cat hunted. Researchers now have modeled an American sabercat...
Jan, 01, 2008
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010
3D images help physicians design appropriate interventions.
Images of realistic and colorful 3D human body parts line the hall outside the lab. Blood and muscle look like blood and muscle; bone looks like bone. You almost expect to find human cadavers being...
Sep, 01, 2011
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
August 2007 saw a surge of new open-source software for simulating musculoskeletal movement. In addition to OpenSim 1.0 (described in the Fall 2007 issue of this magazine), FEBio arrived on the scene...
Apr, 01, 2008
The complexity and variability of aging itself, along with the fragmented nature of researchers’ current understanding of aging, call for tools that can help scientists dig through mounds of data to find often subtle connections.
Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France rode a bicycle until she was 100 years old. When she gave up smoking at age 117, her doctor suspected it was out of pride. (She couldn’t see well enough...
Apr, 01, 2008
Like humans, cells are affected by their physical environment, their neighbors, the context in which they exist. Much research has focused on the chemical signals that control cell behavior. But...
Sep, 01, 2011