As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
The National Institutes of Health are on a mission: To understand and tackle the problems of human health. To make that daunting problem approachable, 15 of the 20 institutes divvy up human health...
Oct, 05, 2012
How Simbios' state-of-the-art software tools are contributing to high-impact biomedical research
Simbios began with a simple idea: that physics-based simulation of biological structures at all scales could benefit from a
unified tool-building effort.
At the same time, the thinking went,...
Oct, 01, 2009
Metagenomes give a picture of the genes driving metabolic processes important to bacterial growth and survival in different environments.
We know they are there, but most microbial denizens of deep oceans, sea floor vents, even our own intestines, remain a mystery. Because most microbes won’t grow in the lab, researchers have few...
Jul, 01, 2008
Unlike most classical engineering materials, biological tissues can adapt to external stimuli by growing in volume: Skin grows in response to wounding; muscles grow in response to exercise; cancer...
Apr, 01, 2011
A unique opportunity to build both flexibility and high performance into a piece of software.
OpenCL is a cross-platform language for doing general purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPUs) and other massively parallel architectures. One of its most interesting features is the...
Apr, 01, 2010
Transparent peer review, replication studies, and journals of negative results all suggest change is on the horizon
As I was writing this editorial, I learned about yet another scientific paper being retracted. This time it was a genetics paper in Science, one of the hundreds of retractions that the blog...
Sep, 01, 2011
Watching changes over time
These days, molecular biologists often gather data over a period of time—observing shifts as they occur inside groups of cells undergoing natural changes. The researchers then face the daunting...
Jun, 01, 2010
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
An opportunity and a challenge
When discussing biocomputation startups, there’s one thing people agree on: These days, they don’t generate much excitement among venture capitalists.
“In the 1990s, there...
Apr, 01, 2007