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Featured
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Comment |
The dawn of computing
Alan Turing's bridging of logic and machines laid the foundation for digital computers, says George Dyson.
- George Dyson
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Letter |
Global landscape of HIV–human protein complexes
Affinity tagging, mass spectroscopy and a tailor-made scoring system are used to identify 497 high-confidence interactions between human proteins and human immunodeficiency virus proteins.
- Stefanie Jäger
- , Peter Cimermancic
- & Nevan J. Krogan
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Feature |
Distance learning: Online education
Internet-based degree programmes are gaining acceptance, but doubts remain about their suitability for graduate science.
- Sarah Kellogg
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Editorial |
An eye for success
Steve Jobs and Apple revolutionized the way scientists render their work.
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News Feature |
The search for alien intelligence: SETI is dead — long live SETI
The closure of the Allen Telescope Array shifts the search for extraterrestrial intelligence away from big science.
- M. Mitchell Waldrop
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News Feature |
Culturomics: Word play
By mining a database of the world's books, Erez Lieberman Aiden is attempting to automate much of humanities research. But is the field ready to be digitized?
- Eric Hand
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News |
Million-dollar problem cracked?
Researcher claims to have solved the biggest problem in computer science.
- Geoff Brumfiel
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Letter |
Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game
Predicting the structure of a folded protein from first principles for any given amino-acid sequence remains a formidable computational challenge. To recruit human abilities to the task, these authors turned their Rosetta structure prediction algorithm into an online multiplayer game in which thousands of non-scientists competed and collaborated to produce new algorithms and search strategies for protein structure refinement. This shows that computationally complex problems can be effectively 'crowd-sourced' through interactive multiplayer games.
- Seth Cooper
- , Firas Khatib
- & Foldit players
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Books & Arts |
The crop circle evolves
A growing underground art movement combines mathematics, technology, stalks and whimsy. Richard Taylor looks forward to a bumper batch of intricate crop patterns this summer.
- Richard Taylor