Brain implants are giving hope to the disabled and revolutionizing neuroscience
Matthew Nagle can move a cursor on a computer screen with only the power of his thoughts. It’s a remarkable feat for anyone, but especially momentous for Nagle, who is paralyzed from the neck...
Aug, 31, 2005
Researchers can now create musculoskeletal models and simulations on an open source platform. In August, Simbios researchers released OpenSim 1.0. This freely available software can, in about 20...
Oct, 01, 2007
It's an exhilarating time for genome-wide association studies
For the past few months it seemed you couldn’t open a journal without reading results of a new genome-wide association study. The results kept pouring in: four studies in April showing seven...
Oct, 01, 2007
They're more than just pretty pictures adorning office walls and presentation slides. Beamed into operating room computer monitors, they're guiding the scalpels of brain surgeons. Dancing...
Jan, 01, 2012
Computing using time steps -- a necessary approximation
Time flows like a continuous, steady river. And it moves forward—never back. These facts create inherent challenges for computer simulations of biological molecules in motion.
It would...
Jun, 19, 2013
On the computer screen, vessels throb realistically with each pump of the heart while the river of blood swirls and pools at curves and intersections. This is a simulation built with SimVascular...
Apr, 01, 2007
August 2007 saw a surge of new open-source software for simulating musculoskeletal movement. In addition to OpenSim 1.0 (described in the Fall 2007 issue of this magazine), FEBio arrived on the scene...
Apr, 01, 2008
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
There are numerous musculoskeletal modeling methods available to make predictions of muscle and joint contact forces. While such predictions can help improve treatments for movement-related disorders...
Jan, 02, 2012
During the final step of cell division, a ring of proteins pinches the cell in two—a process often likened to a purse string drawing shut. The analogy evokes a picture of thread-like proteins...
Apr, 01, 2008