Next Generation Science

This is a quote from a New York Times article late last week:

The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service. A goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from companies like Amazon, Google, I.B.M. and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers. The new program was announced on Thursday [2/5/2010] at a news conference in Washington.

via Microsoft to Offer U.S. Scientists Free Cloud Computing – NYTimes.com

Cloud computing is one of the latest IT buzzwords. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, essentially any program or service transmitted via the internet can be considered cloud computing. An outside company runs the servers and software, and is responsible for maintenance, updates and technical issues. Users are charged for access. With cloud computing, software programs you use aren’t run from your personal computer, but are stored and accessed via the Web, typically within a Web browser. If you’ve ever used Google Gmail or Google Docs, you’ve been computing in the cloud.

Microsoft’s announcement comes two years after similar services were offered by Google and I.B.M. to some of the nation’s elite universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington. According to the NYTimes article, Microsoft hopes to differentiate their service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplify access to Azure (Microsoft’s cloud services operating system) and the use of older software applications like Microsoft Excel.

This is, however, a step backwards for Open Science. The agreement reached between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Microsoft only promotes the use of a proprietary data format and application platform — cloud equivalents of Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Windows. This does nothing but further entrench Microsoft’s dominance in the scientific computing marktet. Indeed, Microsoft has a track record of using standards that aren’t truly open and leveraging proprietary formats to block commercial rivals and/or free alternatives.

Why is there a time limit on the project? Microsoft could have taken a different path and instead made the service free for academic research without expiration. The company could look to the global business market for a revenue stream. Such an arrangement would have truly been an investment in U.S. science.

With the help of four distinguished life science researchers, The Scientist rounds up the top 10 innovations in the life sciences for 2009.

It’s been a tough year for every industry, and the life sciences are no exception. Yet companies and academic laboratories across the globe have developed innumerable new products designed to take your research to the next level. But with many lab budgets tighter than last year, which technologies are worth the investment?

That’s why, for the second year in a row, we have gathered a panel of expert judges to pick the year’s best innovations to hit the life sciences market in the past year. This year’s winners run the gamut from imaging, genomics, and other tools that stunningly capture both intracellular and extracellular processes. Our judges — Steven Wiley, Jean Wang, Shawn Levy, and David Piston — are all known for pushing the technical boundaries, and have collectively published more than 600 academic papers.

It may have been a tough year for industry in general, but it was a great one for life science innovation.

What’s cool about the article: brief product write-ups, followed by comments from the judges.

Products listed include 3D cell culture, microarray-based sequence capture, an electron multiplication charge coupled device (EM-CCD) camera, cell manipulation with light, and protein-induced pluripotency in mouse embryonic fibroblast cells.

Check it out at The Scientist

More serious competition for Google?

Starting today, Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Wolfram|Alpha provides immediate, unbiased, and individualized information, making it distinctly different from what has traditionally been found through web search. By using Wolfram|Alpha, Bing recognizes the complementary benefits of bringing computational knowledge to the forefront of the search experience.

via: Microsoft’s Bing — Introducing One of Wolfram|Alpha’s First Commercial API Customers

The question is: are the search results truly more relevant?

I’d gladly trade quantity for quality, or simply better navigation options (not just relevance and date). However, it strikes me that the results from one service won’t augment the other: if I use Bing for a computational query, I’m not interested in the search engine results, and if I search for articles on the AKT/PTEN pathway in tumor development, what useful information will Wolfram|Alpha offer?

The Bing-Wolfram|Alpha partnership is interesting but not one that will likely attract more users and increase market share.

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