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Data Integrity – Chinese Whispers Will Kill Your Data

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Sharing data is often a bit like passing round a message in chinese whispers - small change and errors can ultimately ruin the data and render it unfit for purpose. Here, we look at data integrity in the context of shared data and introduce some procedures that will mitigate against Chinese Whispers

What Does a Big-Storage Future Look Like in HPC?

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Samsung's recent announcement of 30TB drives is part of a wider trend within high-performance computing (HPC) towards big storage. But, as HPC consultant Laurence Horrocks-Barlow writes, these huge storage capacities present unique challenges and opportunities for organizations on a budget.

Using Supercomputers to Predict Dispersal of Chemicals and Pollutants

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Motivated by a deadly chemical attack in Syria, researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio are pursuing research that may help save lives during an airborne chemical attack. The team used the Stampede2 supercomputer and innovative computer simulation models to replicate the dispersion of the chemical gas released in the Syrian event, which may help improve evacuation speed during future attacks.

Care in the Community – How Biofilms Improve Bacterial Survival

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A single bacterial cell on its own is vulnerable to attack and like many living things they can benefit from safety in numbers. But bacteria take communal living to a whole new level, forming veritable civilizations - the bacterial biofilm.

Antigenic Drift vs Antigenic Shift

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As part of the host-pathogen arms race, viruses are continually evolving to evade the host immune response, be it from previous infection or immunity acquired through vaccination. Here we take a look at the processes of antigenic drift and antigenic shift.

Artificial Intelligence, Real Solutions: How AI Can Accelerate Drug Discovery

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The rate at which new drugs are discovered is in decline, and computer-aided drug design has not produced the radical change in the success of candidate drugs the pharma industry anticipated. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches are the new hope for revolutionizing the drug discovery process. But are these, as computer-aided drug design was, an over-hyped time bomb waiting to be found out? Or is it truly a revolution on the cusp of realizing its promise?

A Faster Way to Quantitatively Profile the Lipidome

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The lipidome refers to the totality of lipids in cells. In this article, PREMIER Biosoft's Sanjib Meitei explains how his team developed a new technique that can quantitate and separate lipidome sammples in just 15 minutes.

Healthcare Interoperability Woes: Three Solutions that Create Optimism

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Healthcare interoperability remains an intractable problem; both healthcare providers and patients feel unease about limited access to medical data, which results in lower care quality and poor patient engagement. Although daunting, these challenges aren’t insurmountable. In this feature, we’ll explore what has been and what could be done to foster the creation of an interoperable infrastructure.

Calculating a Least Squares Regression Line: Equation, Example, Explanation

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Being able to make conclusions about data trends is one of the most important steps in both business and science. Through the magic of least sums regression, and with a few simple equations, we can calculate a predictive model that can let us estimate our data and give us much more power over it. If you want a simple explanation of how to calculate and draw a line of best fit through your data, read on!