IBM's Doctor Watson?

From USATODAY.com

"IBM's supercomputer system, best known for trouncing the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV, is being tapped by one of the largest U.S. health insurers to help diagnose medical problems and authorize treatments.

WellPoint Inc., which has 34.2 million members, will integrate Watson's lightning speed and deep health care database into its existing patient information, helping it choose among treatment options and medicines."

The WellPoint application will combine data from three sources: a patient's chart and electronic records that a doctor or hospital has, the insurance company's history of medicines and treatments, and Watson's huge library of textbooks and medical journals.

IBM says the computer can then sift through it all and answer a question in moments, providing several possible diagnoses or treatments, ranked in order of the computer's confidence, along with the basis for its answer.

Previously IBM developed Deep Blue, "a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding."

Self-directed microspider could repair blood vessels

Image Source: imdb.com

From New Scientist

I remember watching Fantastic Voyage as a kid and wondering if I would some day have tiny machines navigating through my bloodstream, repairing damage and keeping me healthy. Researchers at Penn State are working on it...

"A new spider-like micromachine could swim through a person's blood vessels, healing damaged areas and delivering drugs as it goes.

Ayusman Sen of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues have created the self-propelling microspiders using spheres less than a micrometre wide. Each sphere is made up of two halves – one hemisphere is gold, the other silica – and looks like a gold-and-silver Christmas bauble."

Nearby supernova found within 24 hours, thanks to computing

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

From Wired.com

Where would modern astronomy be without computers to search through the torrent of data?

"The team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, credit the early detection to a specialized survey telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California and advanced computing."