What's the Word In Hot Science?
- Try Foldamers, Glueballs, Qubits
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identify fast-moving fields, Science Watch has been digging through ISI's
Research Front Database for 1999. Each research front, or "cluster" of papers, is an active specialty area consisting of a group of related publications that are frequently co-cited by current journal articles. The cited works, representing the intellectual foundations of the field, are called the "core" of the specialty, or research front. The presence of many recent papers within a core indicates a hot field–a specialty area undergoing rapid transformation...
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 NCBI's Stephen F. Altschul on BLASTing Proteins
Nature has been kind to molecular biologists, or at least relatively so. Although their automated sequencers churn out streams of genetic code by the genome-full, little of the data would make sense without the simple fact that nature finds it easier to conserve genes and proteins, rather than all the time inventing new ones. The best method to identify the function of a gene or a protein is to find a related gene or protein, or an entire family, whose function is already known. That challenge is the kind that computer scientists have wrestled with for decades–identifying similarities in strings of data–and has spawned an entire field of computational molecular biology and a host of computer tools that are racking up citations by the thousands...
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