Category: bioinformatics

How many neurons does a human brain have, and more importantly how many connections?

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…

Life is information

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…

Who could make sense out of mountains of scientific data ?

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…