Die Wahrheit, so scheint es, hat es schwer heutzutage: Oxford Dictionaries erklärte "post-truth" zum internationalen Wort des Jahres 2016; Fake News verbreiten sich oft schneller, als sie entlarvt werden können; und der Relotius-Skandal offenbarte Schwachstellen beim Faktencheck im deutschen Journalismus. Auch in der Wissenschaft gibt es Probleme: Wissenschaftliche Studien, etwa zur Ernährung, widersprechen sich allzu […]

By Nicholas G. Reich, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Massachusetts, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Amherst, USA Seasonal influenza outbreaks cause substantial annual morbidity and mortality worldwide. Accurate forecasts of key features of influenza epidemics, such as the timing and severity of the peak incidence in a given season, can inform […]

By Keith A. Crandall, PhD, Professor ob Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Director - Computational Biology Institute, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA   Microbiome characterization has become an integral component to the study of a wide variety of disease and health for a diversity of organisms. Through the collection of […]

By Erik Lindahl, Stockholms universitet, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm, Sweden Ligand-gated ion channels control the electrical excitation of nerve cells, in particular in the post-synaptic membrane in response to chemical signals mediated by neurotransmitters. These receptors exhibit an amazing diversity in detailed structure and function - some human channels have 15-20 slightly genes, […]

By Prof. Dr. Corinna Hoose, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Deep convective clouds and the resulting heavy precipitation, hail, lightning and wind gusts can cause severe damage. Their forecasting with current numerical weather prediction models is a challenge, both because of limitations on spatial resolution and because of the low […]

By Wolfgang Maier, Director HW Development, IBM R&D - Systems & Technology Group, Böblingen The ongoing digitization of todays world is essentially based on Shannon's theory of Information and its implementation by means of semiconductor cicuitry, which is characterized by Moore's law. The principal concept of this approach is to represent information by bits, which […]

  Prof. Dr. Robert C. Williamson, Australian National University, Research School of Computer Science, Australia With the rapid growth of AI and its deployment with consequences to people, ethical concerns regarding AI have become extremely topical. In this talk I will present a view somewhat contrary relative to much of the current literature. After briefly […]

  Prof. Dr. Jens Meiler, Vanderbilt University, Informatics Center for Structural Biology, USA   Curriculum vitae:  Jens Meiler studied Chemistry Leipzig University in Germany before he obtained his PhD working in the laboratory of Christian Griesinger at the Goethe University in Frankfurt developing new computational methods for biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. In 2001 he moved to […]

  Prof. Dr. Claudia Draxl, Physics Department of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, solid-state theory group   Curriculum vitae:  Claudia Draxl is Einstein Professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany and Max-Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Graduate Center for Quantum Materials. Her research interests cover theorectical concepts and methodology to get insight into a variety […]

  By Robert Best, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Theoretical Biophysical Chemistry Section, USA Intrinsically disordered proteins are now recognized to play a variety of roles in biology, yet are challenging to characterize by experiment owing to the diverse ensemble of structures they populate. This makes molecular simulations, which can generate […]