Big science: Small not always beautiful

Small is not always beautiful

Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for perf...

Small brain, big science

The mouse is a surprising model system to study vision in. It mainly navigates by smell and touch, and doesn’t actually see all that well. It doesn’t have a fovea — the high performance central area of our visual field that we tend to point in the direction of the things that we are consciously looking at — and the resolution of its retinal image across the visual field resembles our peripheral...

Small Fish, Big Science

Francis Hamilton, the Briton who fi rst described zebrafi sh (Danio rerio) in 1822, would be astounded to see the scientifi c attention now afforded to this two-inch-long native of Indian rivers. A fi sh with no economic worth was how he described this little creature. Yet recently, the European Union awarded 12 million Euros to the ZF-MODELS research consortium to study zebrafi sh models for h...

small science , big hopes

A images of tumor cells being vaporized in beams of colorful light, a video produced by the National Cancer Institute proclaims, “the science is at our fingertips.” The science being referred to, which is 80,000 times smaller than the breadth of a single ridge of skin on a human fingertip, is cancer nanotechnology. Nanotechnology, the study of science on a level the width of ten hydrogen atoms,...

Medical data debates: big is better? Small is beautiful?