Medical Animations

My biology instructor presented this link to us in class this week. Hybrid Medical Animation is a company designed to provide quite accurate imaging of biological phenomena--basically its the Pixar of biological modeling.

Enjoy!

This land was made for you and me . . . ?

It took merely two Caterpillar backhoes to strip these hills in Borneo in preparation for a palm tree farm. The palms will be harvested to produce the palm oil found in various cosmetics and dietary supplements. Although Borneo is known for its great biodiversity, palm tree farming is a lucrative market for islanders (whose national affiliations vary between Bruneian, Indonesian, and Malaysian) able to produce enough oil to satisfy the thirst of the Western cosmetic industry. The increase in logging over the most recent decades is not only detrimental to the island's wildlife, but it also contributes to global warming as large stores of carbon are released into the atmosphere when acres are burned.

via NGM.com

Proteins! supercomputers! and Leeuwenhoek! Oh my!

Billionaire computer scientist David Shaw is currently leading a private scientific research group that is attempting to develop a supercomputer that will be able to determine and map the structures of complex protein molecules. Named in honor of the historic microbiologist Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, this new supercomputer should be ready for operation by the end of the year.

The new supercomputer is distinguished from other molecular dynamics computing tools like I.B.M.’s BlueGene/L supercomputer and the Stanford Folding@home distributed computing project in that the machine is designed to simulate a very narrow set of problems on biological processes that take place over a millisecond or longer. Molecular simulations are now done as a series of tiny intervals that may be as short as a femtosecond, one billionth of one millionth of a second, and may last no longer than a microsecond, or one millionth of a second.

A stronger understanding of protein molecule structures may help the scientific community develop more protein-specific medications.

via NYTimes.com