Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Products

MHacks V’s Winning Hack Uses Wolfram Programming Cloud

Draw Anything, an iOS app designed and created by Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs, was the winning hack at the recent MHacks V. Utilizing the power of Wolfram Programming Cloud, the two Draw Anything hackers came out on top after a fierce competition between more than 250 talented teams, made up of 1,200 hackers representing over 100 universities. Students from around the world came to learn, network, and "spend 36 hours building anything they can imagine."
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Jacob Bernoulli’s Legacy in Mathematica

January 16, 2015, marks the 360th birthday anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli (also James, or Jacques). Jacob Bernoulli was the first mathematician in the Bernoulli family, which produced many notable mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob Bernoulli's mathematical legacy is rich. He introduced Bernoulli numbers, solved the Bernoulli differential equation, studied the Bernoulli trials process, proved the Bernoulli inequality, discovered the number e, and demonstrated the weak law of large numbers (Bernoulli's theorem).
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Products

A Mathematical Modeling Approach to Monitoring Liver Function in Drug Trials

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Mathematical modeling is not just used for understanding and designing new products and drugs; modeling can also be used in health care, and in the future, your doctor might examine your liver with a mathematical model just like the one researchers at AstraZeneca have developed. The liver is a vital organ, and currently there isn't really a way to compensate for loss of liver function in the long term. The liver performs a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and secretion of compounds necessary for digestion, just to mention a few. In the US and Europe, up to 15 % of all acute liver failure cases are due to drug-induced liver injury, and the risk of injuring the liver is of major concern in testing new drug candidates. So in order to safely monitor the impact of a new drug candidate on the liver, researchers at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have recently published a method for evaluating liver function that combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and mathematical modeling---potentially allowing for early identification of any reduced liver function in humans. Last year, Wolfram MathCore and AstraZeneca worked together on a project where we investigated some modifications of AstraZeneca's modeling framework. We presented the promising results at the ISMRM-ESMRMB Joint Annual Meeting, which is the major international magnetic resonance conference. In this blog post, I'll show how the Wolfram Language was used to calculate liver function and how more complex models of liver function can be implemented in Wolfram SystemModeler.
Mikael Forsgren, Senior Applications Engineer, SystemModeler
Education & Academic

Serial Interface Control of Astronomical Telescopes

As an amateur astronomer, I'm always interested in ways to use Mathematica in my hobby. In earlier blog posts, I've written about how Mathematica can be used to process and improve images taken of planets and nebulae. However, I'd like to be able to control my astronomical hardware directly with the Wolfram Language. In particular, I've been curious about using the Wolfram Language as a way to drive my telescope mount, for the purpose of automating an observing session. There is precedent for this because some amateurs use their computerized telescopes to hunt down transient phenomena like supernovas. Software already exists for performing many of the tasks that astronomers engage in—locating objects, managing data, and performing image processing. However, it would be quite cool to automate all the different tasks associated with an observing session from one notebook. Mathematica is highly useful because it can perform many of these operations in a unified manner. For example, Mathematica incorporates a vast amount of useful astronomical data, including the celestial coordinates of hundreds of thousands of stars, nebula, galaxies, asteroids, and planets. In addition to this, Mathematica's image processing and data handling functionality are extremely useful when processing astronomical data.
Tom Sherlock, User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Systems Pharmacology—A Case Study on Type 2 Diabetes Using Wolfram Technologies

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. In April this year, I attended the 7th Noordwijkerhout Symposium on Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Systems Pharmacology in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the use of mathematical modeling in pharmacology and pharmaceutical R&D, and this year, the main topic was the emerging concept of systems pharmacology. In general terms, systems pharmacology can be seen as the combination of pharmacometrics and systems biology, with one of its key principles being the integration of biological data and mathematical models describing several different levels of biological complexity—spanning from the molecular or cellular level to that of a whole organism or population. Usually, such integration of data and models is referred to as multilevel, or multiscale, modeling, and has the important benefit of allowing us to translate information on disease and drug effects from the biochemical level—where the effects originate—to changes on the whole body or population level, which are more important from a clinical and pharmacological point of view. In this blog post, I thought we would take a closer look at what a systems pharmacology approach might look like. Specifically, I'll focus on some of the practical aspects of building complex, multilevel biological models, and how these can be dealt with using Wolfram SystemModeler.
Robert Palmer, Applications Engineer
Education & Academic

Wolfram|Alpha Apps and Math Course Apps for Windows—Just Released

Just in time for the holidays---Wolfram|Alpha apps for Windows and Windows Phone have been released! We’re excited to announce that our popular Wolfram|Alpha app and several Wolfram Course Assistant Apps are now available for your Windows 8.1 devices. The Wolfram|Alpha applications are universal apps, and utilize Windows’ distinct style while bringing to Windows users some of the features people have come to expect from Wolfram|Alpha: a custom keyboard for easily entering queries, a large selection of examples to explore Wolfram|Alpha’s vast knowledgebase, history to view your recent queries, favorites so you can easily answer your favorite questions, the ability to pin specific queries to the start menu, and more.
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

Deck the Halls: Tweet-a-Program Holiday Ornament Challenge

It's the holiday season, and Wolfram is gearing up for bright lights and winter weather by holding a new Tweet-a-Program challenge. To help us celebrate the holidays, tweet your best holiday ornament-themed lines of Wolfram Language code. As with our other challenges, we'll use the Wolfram Language to randomly select winning tweets (along with a few of our favorites) to pin, retweet, and share with our followers. If you're a lucky winner, we'll send you a free Wolfram T-shirt! If you need some help getting into the holiday spirit, check out these examples:
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

Machine Gun Jetpack: The Real Physics of Improbable Flight

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Could you fly using machine guns as the upward driving force? That's the question asked in Randall Munroe's What if? article, "Machine Gun Jetpack." It turns out you could, because some machine guns have enough thrust to lift their own weight, and then some. In this post, I'll explore the dynamics of shooting machine guns downward and study the actual forces, velocities, and heights that could be achieved. I'll also repeat the warning from the What if? post: Please do not try this at home. That's what we have modeling software for. Machine gun with a squirrel on top
Malte Lenz, Test Engineer, SystemModeler
Show More