Modeling how to reopen collapsed airways
Scientists are breathing new life into airway modeling. Using a three-dimensional mathematical model of the delicate passages in the lungs, researchers have found that strongly collapsed airways are...
Jan, 01, 2007
For a century, neuroscientists have dissected, traced, eavesdropped on, and are now compiling a seemingly endless cast of players in the nervous system. As we keep gathering more and more molecular...
Apr, 01, 2009
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
Hidden Markov models estimate DNA loop kinetics
The hidden Markov model—a statistical model used for decades in fields as diverse as speech recognition and climatology—has received an update and a new application. Researchers at the...
Apr, 01, 2007
Modeling what triggers heart cells to relax
When a heart beats, millions of muscle cells contract in unison to pump blood to the body; then they relax, allowing the heart to refill. Though scientists have carefully characterized the mechanisms...
Apr, 01, 2006
Confidence boost for modelers
It’s often said that all models are wrong, but some are useful. And one model that certainly falls in the “useful” category is the human lower-limb model that Scott Delp published...
Jun, 01, 2010
Many tasks in biomedical data analysis, such as kinematic data collection, involve 3-D motion analysis which requires precise representation of an object’s position and orientation. ...
Apr, 01, 2006
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
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
New computational model simulates how particles in the air get deposited in the lungs during breathing
Depending on their nature, microscopic particles suspended in air—called aerosols—...
Apr, 01, 2009