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Content about health and medicine

June 19, 2013

Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s next funding cycle, is set to launch in January 2014. With less than a year to go, you may be wondering: what is Horizon 2020? What makes it different to the frameworks that preceded it? And what are the implications, both for the e-infrastructure projects themselves and the researchers who benefit from them? e-Science Briefing’s Stefan Janusz gives an overview of the road ahead...

June 12, 2013

In the fight against HIV, better understanding of the structure of the virus could lead to new antiretroviral drugs. University of Illinois researchers recently used molecular simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer to determine the chemical structure of the HIV capsid, which plays a key role in debilitating the immune system.

 

June 12, 2013

The EU-funded MyHealthAvatar project is testing the idea of a Europe-wide network of health avatars for each individual citizen. Each avatar will be a web-based data depository containing a full record of that individual’s health status. The project aims to collect and provide access to a combination of data sources, simulations models, data-mining techniques, organ systems, and space-time scales. 

June 5, 2013

Rossen Apostolov will be discussing some of the lessons learned from the ScalaLife project at ISC'13 in Leipzig next month. Since 2011, the EU-funded ScalaLife project has been working to help enhance the models used by life scientists.

May 29, 2013

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, US, are building causal network models of activity in the human brain by measuring magnetic fields. Read about the unique challenges they face and how high throughput computing is enabling their research.

 

May 22, 2013

The Human Brain project made headlines earlier this year as one of two EU flagship projects that won 1 billion euros' worth of funding over the next decade. Nages Sieslack interviews project leader Henry Markram ahead of his keynote speech at this year's ISC'13 event in Leipzig, Germany.

May 15, 2013

At TedxCERN, 18-year-old Florida high school student and Google Science Fair Winner, Brittany Wenger, explained how she built a neural network to help tackle breast cancer.

April 24, 2013

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.

April 10, 2013

The University of Texas at Austin and TACC competed against the top supercomputing centers and universities to claim one of the most advanced systems in the world — and won. The prize, an estimated $50 million-plus investment over a four-year period.

March 20, 2013

With more than 10,000 species of birds known to exist, scientists know little about their diversity and development over time. Freely licensed software developed at the University of Utah, US, has enabled researchers to pinpoint a single gene responsible for some very glamorous hairdos.

March 20, 2013

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.

March 6, 2013

Thanks to the high-speed GÉANT network and the computing power of the European Grid Infrastructure, researchers in Italy are creating music from electroencephalography data. Listening to these melodies could help researchers forecast impending seizures.

March 6, 2013

As the second anniversary of the largest earthquake in Japanese history approaches, Ben Katsumi explains how cloud computing helped the relief effort following the natural disaster.

Plus: Discover how reseachers at the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency are using HPC to develop improved chemicals for cleaning up radioactive cesium isotopes.

 

February 27, 2013

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.

February 27, 2013

Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine use supercomputers to simulate important proteins and investigate how they interact with medication on a molecular level.

February 27, 2013

Scientists now have enough data to analyze brain activity using graph theory. Read about their unique approach and their discovery of how the brain could code and recall spatial and temporal memories at the same time.

February 20, 2013

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.

January 30, 2013
Image courtesy Mike Schropp, totalgeekdom.com.

January 30, 2013

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.

January 16, 2013

With current testing methods unable to accurately assess the more than 2 million experiences of concussion in the US each year, advancements in diagnosis and treatment are critical. Revolutionary, high-resolution 'virtual recordings' of electrical currents in the brain could provide a solution.

January 16, 2013

Variations in thickness cause the rainbow color in this ultra-stable glass. Image courtesy Mark Ediger.

January 16, 2013

Current medical practice lacks the ability to fully assess the risk of rupture for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Likewise, many key parameters vary widely among people. Using the resources of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, US, Ender Finol is developing computational models that help determine when surgical intervention is necessary.

January 9, 2013

Volunteers from the World Community Grid have helped scientists conduct research into over 5 million protein-protein interactions. The computational simulations provide scientists with a greater understanding of the roles proteins play in neuromuscular diseases.

 

 

December 5, 2012

This summer, Florida high school student Brittanny Wenger was awarded first place in the Google Science Fair. She created a cloud-based neural network to help doctors better detect breast cancer using a less invasive form of biopsy.

November 21, 2012

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.