• Open Access to British Scientific Research in Two Years

    The Guardian | The British government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. 

    Jul 16, 2012

  • Allan Snavely, Architect of Gordon Supercomputer, Dies

    HPC Wire | Allan Snavely, a widely recognized expert in high-performance computing whose innovative thinking led to the development of the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, died of an apparent heart attack over the weekend.

    Jul 16, 2012

  • Better Medicine Brought to You by Big Data

    GigaOM | Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.

    Jul 16, 2012

  • The Skeptical Outsider: How to Rescue the Life Sciences from Technological Torpor

    Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider | Can a new generation of computational biologists cross-trained in the engineering disciplines, rescue the pharmaceutical industry, long overdue for change, asks Bill Frezza in his July 'Skeptical Outsider' column. 

    Jul 13, 2012

  • Atul Butte, King of the Data Mountain

    Stanford Medicine | Atul Butte, chief of systems medicine at Stanford University, has no lab in the orthodox sense, rather a warren of cubicles housing computers and anywhere from 10 to 25 people averaging a new publication every two weeks — from new uses for old drugs to insights into the genetics of diabetes.

    Jul 13, 2012

  • Big Data and One Man's Personal Health

    Stanford Medicine |Stanford professor Mike Snyder compiled an integrative personal genomics profile, or iPOP, consisting of 30 terabytes of data or enough CD-quality audio to play non-stop for seven years -- to reveal in exquisite detail unforseen threats to his health.

    Jul 13, 2012

  • 23andMe Nabs CureTogether to Boost Crowdsourced Genetic Research

    TechCrunch | 23andMe announced that it is scooping up the four-year-old company CureTogether, a similarly-focused startup that aims to give people the tools needed to create their own research studies, learn about their health, and connect with experts and others who suffer from similar conditions.

    Jul 12, 2012

  • 'Big Data' Journal GigaScience Makes Its Debut

    Bio-IT World | Stressing new mechanisms to uphold the reproducibility of scientific results, the inaugural issue of the ‘big data’ open-access journal GigaScience and its companion database, GigaDB, is published this week.  

    Jul 12, 2012

  • Complete Genomics Claims 99.99999% Accuracy with LFR Technology

    Bio-IT World | Complete Genomics has published details of its Long Fragment Read (LFR) technology for whole genome sequencing in this week’s issue of Nature, which allows for full phasing of parental chromosomes and attains an overall genome sequencing accuracy of 99.99999%.

    Jul 11, 2012

  • Kari Stefansson on deCODE’s Alzheimer’s Discovery, Future Plans

    Bio-IT World | In a detailed interview, deCODE Genetics CEO Kari Stefansson discusses the wide-ranging impact of his company's latest discovery -- a rare gene variant that protects against Alzheimer's disease with important drug development implications -- and what else his company can do now that it has sequenced or imputed the genomes of an entire nation.

    Jul 11, 2012

  • Genia Brin’s Double Parkinson’s Mutation

    Moment Magazine | Eugenia Brin,  mother of Google founder Sergey Brin, has an extremely rare form of Parkinson's disease -- she carries two copies of a faulty gene known as LRRK2.  

    Jul 10, 2012

  • A Preview of September’s Bio-IT World Cloud Summit

    Bio-IT World | This September, Bio-IT World will host its second annual Cloud Summit in San Francisco, expanded to feature three concurrent tracks – High-Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud-Optimized Networks, and Data-Focused Cloud Applications. Keynote presentations will be given by Miron Livny (University Wisconsin), Hugh Williams (eBay) and Vijay Pande (Stanford).

    Jul 9, 2012

  • Genetic Gamble: Whole Genome Sequencing and Cancer

    New York Times | Oncologist Lukas Wartman was facing certain death last fall, but today he is alive and doing well. Dr. Wartman is a pioneer in a new approach to stopping cancer -- the use of whole genome sequencing to reveal the telltale mutation(s) behind his unique form of the disease, followed by the use of a rational therapy -- in this case, a drug called Sutent.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • The FarGen Project: Sequencing the Genome of an Entire Population

    ScienceNordic | The FarGen project is preparing to sequence the genetic material of the entire 50,000 population of the Faroe Islands, and could become a model for personalised medicine throughout the world.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • U.S. Pushes for More Scientists, But the Jobs Aren’t There

    Washington Post | The Obama Administration has repeatedly called for American universities to churn out more scientists, but with U.S. drug firms slashing some 300,000 jobs since 2000, there are simply too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

    Jul 9, 2012

  • Larry Smarr, the Measured Man

    The Atlantic | Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.

    Jul 6, 2012

  • Cloudera and Mount Sinai: The Structure of a Big Data Revolution?

    ZDNet | It's Big Data meets Multiscale Biology: Cloudera, the poster child of the Hadoop ecosystem, and the Mt Sinai School of Medicine Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, have announced a collaboration to solve medical challenges with Big Data.

    Jul 6, 2012

  • University of Oxford Launches Top GPU-Based Supercomputer

    TechWeek Europe | A consortium of UK academic institutions, led by the University of Oxford, has launched “Emerald” – the most powerful GPU-accelerated computer in the UK.

    Jul 5, 2012

  • DNA Mapping of Alzheimer’s Patients Gives Deep Dive View

    Bloomberg | Working with $2 million in new grants from the Alzheimer's Association and the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, researchers at the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative will start sequencing the DNA of 800 participants in a study attempting to find the root causes of memory loss. 

    Jul 5, 2012

  • How Darwin Can Fight Cancer

    Daily Telegraph | A new paper in Nature co-authored by Johns Hopkins molecular oncologist Bert Vogelstein and Harvard evolutionary expert Martin Nowak suggests a way to use the mathematics of evolution to predict the spread of cancer, and thereby treat it far more effectively.

    Jul 5, 2012