Putting neural and behavioral information together to model addiction
To non-smokers, the nasty-smelling habit is inexplicable. But now neurocomputational researchers have developed a hypothetical model to explain how nicotine produces addictive behavior. The first...
Mar, 31, 2006
Janelia farmers pursue novel, cross-disciplinary collaborations to work on long-term, unwieldy scientific problems difficult to tackle in a single laboratory
The folks at Howard Hughes Medical Institute who dreamed up Janelia Farm say it is as much a social innovation as a scientific one. “We are creating a different culture here,” says Gerald...
Jun, 30, 2006
RunBot, already the world’s fastest bipedal robot, has now also learned to keep its balance when walking up ramps. “We have achieved a synthesis of different functionalities, between...
Sep, 30, 2007
Scientists are bringing diverse methods together to better understand schizophrenia and other mental illnesses
In an oft-cited story, six blind men each touch an elephant to describe its essential nature. The one who touches the tail reports that the elephant is like a rope. The others each touch a different...
Jun, 03, 2015
About this issue of Biomedical Computation Review
One of the main goals of this magazine is to create and foster a sense of community among the diverse disciplines that make up biomedical computation (hence our tagline: diverse disciplines, one...
Aug, 31, 2005
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Sep, 30, 2007
A computational model of alpha-synuclein as it aggregates
Under a microscope, the curious protein clumps that dot the brains of Parkinson’s patients stick out like the culprits they are. But no one has yet caught the protein—alpha-synuclein...
Jun, 30, 2007
Today’s computers are fast, cheap, and effective at crunching numbers—yet they still cannot equal the versatility of even the smallest of Earth’s life forms when it comes to...
Dec, 31, 2006
Computation shows that the skull guides the wrinkling
In the four months before birth, a fetus’s brain grows from a smooth tube of neurons into a highly crinkled, convolved mass of tissue. Because the cerebral cortex has a surface area nearly...
May, 31, 2010
The tools to sequence the genomes of individual cells yield data that’s noisy and somewhat unreliable. What bag of tricks can bioinformaticians use to address these challenges?
To study genomes, researchers have typically pooled the genetic material from thousands of cells together. But this approach can only get at “average genomes” or “average...
Mar, 31, 2016