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
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
Bringing models closer to reality
When the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia launched on January 16, 2003, a large piece of foam fell off and hit the left wing. Alerted of the impact, NASA engineers used a computer model to predict...
Oct, 19, 2012
Defining biomedical computation
Looking back at some of the intellectual achievements of the last half century, it is clear that humankind has made tremendous progress in many areas, but arguably none more so than in the two areas...
Jun, 01, 2005
In 1999, Mark J. Stock, PhD, took his first accidental step toward becoming an artist. He used a 3-D rendering program to help him debug some code. “The first image that came out was beautiful...
Jan, 01, 2010
Mimicking the social behavior of groups of animals to search for the minimum value of an objective function
Optimizing the solution to a problem occurs commonly in engineering and in nature. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm borrows ideas from nature and is a fairly new method of...
Jan, 01, 2007
A myriad of environmental changes inspire only a handful of responses
Biologists’ favorite bacterium grows almost anywhere—from the human gut to the pounding surf. But E. coli’s remarkable adaptability apparently stems from being predictable rather...
Apr, 01, 2006
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
A combination of genomics data and molecular dynamics modeling is sufficient to predict protein complex structure
The zone where two proteins interact presents a possible target for drug design. But identifying possible drugs requires a detailed understanding of the interface between the proteins. Computer...
Apr, 01, 2010
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