Content about biology

A chemical treatment that turns whole organs transparent, offers instant advances in the field of ‘connectomics’ — the push to map the brain’s wiring. Read about CLARITY, devised by Karl Deisseroth and his team at Stanford University in California, US.

Find out how PRACE is helping researchers to simulate the movement of dinosaurs, including some of the very biggest animals to ever roam on land.

Faced with the daunting prospect of profiling the complexities of the immune system, researchers at Harvard Medical School/Business School enlisted the help of the world’s largest community of software experts on the site TopCoder.  A recent paper in Nature Biotechnology indicates a cultural shift in academia with experts engaging the collective skills of those outside their community, in order to help them overcome methodological barriers to their work.

Calling all citizen scientists. With the exploding availability of data, the need for analysis is steadily becoming a bottleneck in many scientific pursuits. Read about a project aimed at bringing neuroscience to the masses in a way that may surprise and inspire you to take part.

Using software to predict how proteins fold at the molecular level, scientists have discovered new information about misfolding and the submolecular level energies involved. Read about the open source software used for simulations, and the potential implications for treatment of degenerative diseases.

A new graph analytics appliance – Sherlock – is designed to speed up the modeling process and open doors to a wide range of scientific research. Launched in February, Sherlock will enable scientists and researchers to better understand the often hidden, complex relationships in big data.

Scientists in the US and France are gaining new insights into the genetic processes underlying brain development. The research has the potential to revolutionize the way mental disorders are both diagnosed and treated — and could have major repurcussions for the way drugs are designed in the future.

Brazil has one of the highest levels of plant biodiversity in the world, but many local habitats are under pressure. Find out how the EUBrazilOpenBio project is using cloud computing to help conservation efforts in the region.

To learn more about the integration of biological systems and pathologies, scientists look to multi-scale modeling to bridge the gap between molecular-, cellular-, and tissue-level information. Read about a new opportunity to advance discovery in these areas.

Extracting new knowledge from big data science is such a problem that projects are now underway which may transform research publishing and find relationships too complex for the human mind to see alone.

Researchers have discovered the mechanism of how a dangerous class of carcinogen stabilizes the very DNA it damages. This finding could lead to better preventative medicine and cancer treatment.