Content about health and medicine

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.

- Amber Harmon

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.

Speakers at the SC12 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, highlight the role of scientific research in continuing to drive and benefit from high performance computing. They argued that a strong voice for the continued advancement of technology is vital in ensuring evolving research and economic leadership.

At the end of last month's EGI Technical Forum 2012, we caught up with EGI director Steven Newhouse to get his take on the week's highlights, as well as the challenges for the year ahead.

VENUS-C (www.venus-c.eu) has successfully put the requirements of end-user communities – such as researchers and SMEs – at the forefront of development, providing scalable and interoperable cloud resources that combine both open source and commercial solutions to offer the best of both worlds. With co-funding from the EC under FP7, this two-year project is one of the first cloud initiatives to feature in the European Digital Agenda (DAE).

Diseases caused by fungi are deadly to people with weak immune systems. Today's antibiotics are too toxic. Researchers use the grid to find antibiotics that are less harmful.