The connectome simply put is the wiring diagram of your brain. But this is not so simple to obtain due the incredible complexity of the human brain. I wrote previously in the last couple weeks of new research that indicates that one human brain has more ‘switches’ than all the computers in the world. Work…
Category: bioinformatics
bioinformatics, Uncategorized
How many neurons does a human brain have, and more importantly how many connections?
by Ward Plunet • • 1 Comment
According to Wikipedia the human brain has between 50 and 100 billion neurons, and 1000 trillion connections. Now those are huge numbers. Now according to other respectable sights (university sites) the human brain’s estimated number of neurons range quite widely: 10 billion, 100 billion, 200 billion. So maybe we don’t know the exact number but…
bioinformatics, genetics
Personal genomics keeps getting cheaper
by Ward • • 0 Comments
Personal genomics seem to be speeding up as fast as consumer electronics – soon there will be a need for a genome-gadget website. The latest news as reported by Genetic Future is the announcement of complete genome sequencing for $ 5,000 by mid 2009! The company behind this announcement is Complete Genomics which are new…
bioinformatics, brain hack, information
Designing the human brain: the big blue singularity
by Ward • • 8 Comments
For any of you fans of the singularity you will have to check out this short 15 minute video; “Designing the human brain” (hosted at seedmagazine). One component of the singularity is when man humans are able to build computers as powerful as the human brain. Some also think of this point as when we…
bioinformatics, genetics, information
The price of personal genomics keep coming down
by Ward • • 0 Comments
Just a few week ago I updated some of the price drops in personal genomics (price drop from $ 999 to $ 399 for the scanning of 500,000+ SNPs). But these personal genome scans are not the entire genome but for specific single nucleotide polymorphisms. The holy grail of personal genomics is the scanning of…
bioinformatics, genetics
New advances in personal genomics
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via CrunchBase There has been some interesting advances in personal genomics recently which is great news, but will the rise of cheap personal genome scanning result in improvement in our health? Price is one limiting factor for lack of adoption of personal genome scanning and its potential to lead to better health treatments (pharmagenomics).…
bioinformatics, genetics
Life is information
by Ward • • 1 Comment
DNA contains the information, in a code, that enables an organism to become ‘alive’. Life is really all about information. That is why the previous post regarding Google getting into health is not far fetched since Google is all about information. If you want to read a great series of articles about information and the…
bioinformatics, genetics
Who could make sense out of mountains of scientific data ?
by Ward • • 0 Comments
I posted earlier today about the mountain of cancer data donated by GlaxoSmithKline. While scientist and big pharmaceuticals are constantly generating more biological data the bottle neck problem is mining this data to find useful information. Over at PIMM, Attila in his blog discusses a feature article in Wired magazine and offers a potential solution…