Genetics

The roles of genes and 3D genome folds in determining health

Whether we stay healthy or become seriously ill is determined by our genes. But also, the folding of our genome has a significant influence on this, as the 3D genome organization regulates which genes are switched on and ...

Neuroscience

Q&A: Building models of the brain to take them apart

Kanaka Rajan describes herself as an ever-curious, "stick-my-finger-in-the-electrical-socket kind of person" who enjoys working with her hands. Forays into engineering and experimental neuroscience led Rajan to her true calling: ...

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Computer simulation

A computer simulation, a computer model or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical modeling of many natural systems in physics (computational physics), chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those systems, or to observe their behavior.

Computer simulations vary from computer programs that run a few minutes, to network-based groups of computers running for hours, to ongoing simulations that run for days. The scale of events being simulated by computer simulations has far exceeded anything possible (or perhaps even imaginable) using the traditional paper-and-pencil mathematical modeling: over 10 years ago, a desert-battle simulation, of one force invading another, involved the modeling of 66,239 tanks, trucks and other vehicles on simulated terrain around Kuwait, using multiple supercomputers in the DoD High Performance Computer Modernization Program; a 1-billion-atom model of material deformation (2002); a 2.64-million-atom model of the complex maker of protein in all organisms, a ribosome, in 2005; and the Blue Brain project at EPFL (Switzerland), began in May 2005, to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level.

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