Content about health and medicine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.