big data

by Alex Cabral figures by Sean Wilson In 2003, with the completion of the Human Genome Project, the entire human genome was sequenced for the first time. The sequencing cost nearly $1 billion and took 13 years to complete. Today, the human genome can be…

by Krissy Lyon  Think about your daily commute. How many times have you hit every green light while driving or stepped out your front door just in time to catch your bus? If you’re like me, then your answer is probably never. But what if you could catch…

by Aparna Nathan Hospitals are churning out medical data at an unprecedented rate. 153 billion gigabytes of health care data were produced in 2013, and we’re expected to reach 2300 billion gigabytes per year by 2020. That’s almost 9 billion MacBooks’…

We cannot predict how long we each live, but can our genes? For as long as longevity has been a desirable good, it has never been equally distributed across humanity, not even within families. The role of heritable traits in longevity is still debated.…

by Jessica Sagers figures by Brad Wierbowski The only word Charles Chidsey could think of to describe his situation was hairy. “Moderate hypertrichosis has been observed in five of eight patients on chronic treatment,” he noted in a comment near the…