Using Rosetta@Home, a program that runs on the personal computers of 150,000 volunteers worldwide, David Baker’s team predicted the structure of a 112-amino-acid protein from scratch.
When nature folds an amino acid sequence into a protein, it usually knows that just one conformation is the right one. But when a computer tries to do the same thing, it often predicts multiple...
Jan, 01, 2008
Words of Advice from the Scientists Featured in Profiles in Computer Science Courage
Find Your Passion
“Not every computer scientist will fall in love with the field like I did,...
Apr, 01, 2011
Exploring the current state of connectomics--in the midst of hype
Connectomics is having a moment. Following on the heels of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics, the latest “omic” to seize the spotlight is generating...
Jun, 20, 2013
Computers and human experts duke it out over who is better at diagnosing disease, interpreting images, or predicting protein structure
Dorothy Rosenthal tenses over her microscope, peering at the problematic nucleus on the Pap smear yet again. “It’s abnormal,” she decides, and then hesitates. “No, it’s...
Jul, 01, 2006
Plot shows how functional communities in yeast protein interaction networks change in size and nature at different levels of resolution
Splashes of bold color seem to drip down the page, bringing to mind the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Spurred by the beauty of the image she had created, Anna Lewis,* a graduate student studying...
Apr, 01, 2011
Biomechanical models contribute to a better understanding of both the normal and the diseased eye.
Squint, and you can almost make out that bird soaring over the horizon. But determining whether it’s a hawk or a raven will be nearly impossible for someone with myopia, also known as...
Feb, 19, 2013
Jay Humphrey at Texas A&M collaborates with Simbios on a fluid/solid/growth model of the cardiovascular system.
from http://biomedicalcomputationreview.org/content/simbios-bringing-biomedical-simulation-your-fingertips
A new model of arteries that simultaneously simulates fluid, solid, and growth...
Oct, 01, 2009
Anyone who has ever waited minutes, hours, or even days for software to complete a biomedical computation will be happy to hear that almost every personal computer is capable of better. Today,...
Jul, 01, 2008
We are crawling with bugs. It might even be better to say that we are bugs. For every human cell in our bodies there may be ten or even a hundred other cells that aren’t human at all. Yet many...
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