SexuallyTransmittedDiseases
Latest
Tinder's STD-awareness webpage helps it save face
Presumably, we all learned about it in health class: sexual encounters with strangers brings with it the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Stay safe, use protection and get tested. Now, Tinder is making sure its users know where to get tested with a new "Health Safety" section on its website, a simple page urging users to use condoms, be honest with their partner and to seek out free testing facilities. If you've been paying attention to recent news, you might have picked up on the health section's ulterior motive: to get the AIDS Health Foundation off Tinder's back.
Scientists create first computer simulation of a complete organism
Everyone, meet Mycoplasma genitalium, the subject of many scientific papers, even more vists to the clinic and now the first organism to be entirely recreated in binary. Computer models are often used for simplicity, or when studying the real thing just ain't viable, but most look at an isolated process. Stanford researchers wanted to break with tradition and selected one of the simplest organisms around, M. genitalium, to be their test subject. They collated data from over 900 publications to account for everything going on inside the bacterial cell. But it wasn't just a case of running a model of each cellular process. They had to account for all the interactions that go on -- basically, a hell of a lot of math. The team managed to recreate cell division using the model, although a single pass took almost 10 hours with MATLAB software running on a 128-core Linux cluster. The representation was so accurate it predicted what M. genitalium looks like, just from the genetic data. And, despite the raft of research already conducted on the bacterium, the model revealed previously undiscovered inconsistencies in individual cell cycles. Such simulations could be used in the future to better understand the complicated biology of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. Looks like we're going to need more cores in that cluster. If you'd like to hear Stanford researcher Markus Covert's view on the work, we've embedded some footage beyond the fold.
