Computation offers a window into a disease often described as a black box
The growing threats of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) are spurring worldwide interest in faster and more innovative research approaches, such as...
Jun, 06, 2012
The Fall 2005 “Under the Hood” column discussed the curse of dimensionality—too many numerical components for each data point—and the curse of dataset sparsity—too few...
Oct, 01, 2010
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
Looking inside the cell without opening it
When light hits an obstacle, its scattering pattern reveals information regarding the internal structure of the obstacle. If that obstacle is a cell, the scattering pattern might indicate whether the...
Jun, 01, 2005
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
During the one-hour drama that is human cell division, many genes enter and exit the stage. Until now, researchers did not know the identities of many of these actors, nor understand their various...
Apr, 01, 2011
Contests involving algorithms for protein structure prediction, natural language processing, and computer-aided disease detection are giving researchers a jolt of adrenalin and moving these fields forward
From all parts of the computational spectrum, researchers are duking it out: They are throwing their algorithms into the ring to see which one will out-perform all others on a particular task....
Jul, 01, 2006
Speedups produced by a C++ library of Clustering Algorithms for Massively Parallel Architectures Including GPU Nodes
GenBank, a repository for storing biological sequences, currently contains some 124 billion base pairs and is doubling in size every 18 months.1 Though not a huge number compared to the billion...
Apr, 01, 2011
Bridging the gap between surgical simulation and surgical practice
When a knife cuts into an organ, forces push back in ways that mechanical engineers can, to some extent, predict. But other factors are also at play: Ions shift in solution within cells, causing...
Jan, 01, 2010
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010