US “big science” looks abroad

Science Abroad

Industrial Science Looks Ahead.

vances ever closer to the post-war horizon. With Victory will come the day when the scientific instruments and processes of war will turn abruptly to peace. Machines and tools, as well as industrial and economic thinking, will be converted quickly from the demands of war to the needs of peace. Industry will be called upon to relieve the strains of war with utmiost speed by ministering anew to h...

Big science, little science.

In the USA, where I live and work, it is well known that I have little love for structural genomics—the attempt to determine the structures of most or all of the proteins in an organism by some combination of high-throughput X-ray crystallo graphy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and homology modelling. My reasons are a matter of public record: structural genomics is based on an assumpt...

Big Data Science Needs Big Data Middleware

There has been a “Cambrian explosion” of big data systems proposed and evaluated in the last eight years, but relatively little understanding of how these systems or the ideas they represent compare and complement one another. In enterprise and science situations, “one size is unlikely to fit all”: we see analytics teams running multiple systems simultaneously. However, the highest level of abs...

Small brain, big science

The mouse is a surprising model system to study vision in. It mainly navigates by smell and touch, and doesn’t actually see all that well. It doesn’t have a fovea — the high performance central area of our visual field that we tend to point in the direction of the things that we are consciously looking at — and the resolution of its retinal image across the visual field resembles our peripheral...