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20 March 2013

Crowdsourcing the dark matter of biology

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.

Zara Qadir

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Interview: Thomas Sterling

High-performance computing veteran Thomas Sterling will be delivering a keynote speech on HPC achievement and impact at this year's International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig Germany (ISC'13). He speaks exclusively to Nages Sieslack...

Nages Sieslack

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Innovative software tools help thrust rock pigeons into the spotlight

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.

Amber Harmon

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Visual

Stories from the Grid: Are comets born in asteroid collisions?

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Spotlight

Playing mind games

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.

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Cause and effect network models and high-throughput computing

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...

Amber Harmon

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Cryptography: Making elliptic communication cryptic

Information is power, which makes data security increasingly important. Mathematical research that utilises high performance computing is being used to develop procedures for encrypting data and to ensure that these encryption protocols are secure....

Anna Demming

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Choosing the right scientific software

Last week, the results of a survey were published in the journal Scienceshowing that many non-scientific factors often come into play when researchers select software for modeling and other purposes. Could researchers' inability to...

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Collision course

What happens when galaxies collide? They reshape and eventually merge, as the increased light of intense star formation provides glimpses into the evolution of our universe.

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The race to understand the human brain

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...

Nages Sieslack

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