Disentangling the different types of skeptics and what modelers can learn from each.
What are the telltale signs of a modeling talk at a biology conference? Just look for the sighs, shifting, and eye-rolling in the audience, says Donald C. Bolser, PhD, professor of physiological...
Jun, 05, 2012
Multi-scale modeling is now at what might be called its gestational stage
For centuries, mathematics has been an indispensable ally of the physical sciences and engineering. Planes fly and telephones work because engineers know how to simplify physical systems into...
Apr, 01, 2006
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
Moving from intuition to evidence-based intervention
To understand how muscles contract and joints flex, researchers have dissected cadavers and experimented with animals. They can describe how bones, muscles, and tendons connect in a complicated...
Jan, 01, 2007
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
Contests involving algorithms for protein structure prediction, natural language processing, and computer-aided disease detection are giving researchers a jolt of adrenalin and moving these fields forward
From all parts of the computational spectrum, researchers are duking it out: They are throwing their algorithms into the ring to see which one will out-perform all others on a particular task....
Jul, 01, 2006
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
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
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