An elegant new model of balance control suggests the brain only cares about one thing: the body’s center of mass.
Bumped from behind, a person may step forward to avoid falling. Perhaps her arms fly out as well. To the untrained eye, these movements seem like the result of the brain controlling individual nerve...
Jan, 01, 2008
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
Postdocs get a glance at the entire field and their first inside view of NIH grant-making
If he were a graduate student now, Francis Collins would be studying computational biology. That’s what the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told a rapt audience at the...
Feb, 19, 2013
University of Florida’s B.J. Fregly hopes to use OpenSim to simulate the knee.
from http://biomedicalcomputationreview.org/content/simbios-bringing-biomedical-simulation-your-fingertips
B.J. Fregly, PhD, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and of...
Oct, 01, 2009
Katherine Holzbaur of Wake Forest University Medical School simulates the biomechanics of the upper limb.
from http://biomedicalcomputationreview.org/content/simbios-bringing-biomedical-simulation-your-fingertips
Katherine Holzbaur, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest...
Oct, 01, 2009
The clear winner: Big Data
Several biomedical computing projects received big money in the fall of 2012. If there’s one clear winner, it’s “Big Data”: three of the grants focus on building new...
Feb, 19, 2013
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
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
RunBot, already the world’s fastest bipedal robot, has now also learned to keep its balance when walking up ramps. “We have achieved a synthesis of different functionalities, between...
Oct, 01, 2007
How adding jet packs to characters' hands can help optimize animations
An animated human figure seeking the optimal path from point A to point B typically relies on computationally expensive hard constraints that force the trajectories to be physically realistic. But...
Jun, 20, 2013