Squint, and you can almost  make out that bird soaring over the horizon. But determining whether it’s a hawk or a raven will be nearly impossible for someone with myopia, also known as nearsightedness. In this common condition, light focuses on a spot in front of, rather than on, the retina. Eyeglasses can correct the defect, as can refractive surgery in which a lens-shaped portion of the cornea—the outer layer of the eye in front of the pupil—is removed in a precise way, pushing the focus back to the retina.

Several biomedical computing projects received big money in the fall of 2012. If there’s one clear winner, it’s “Big Data”: three of the grants focus on building new computational infrastructure and tools for dealing with massive biological datasets. A fourth grant focuses on building new tools for multiscale modeling.

If he were a graduate student now, Francis Collins would be studying computational biology. That’s what the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told a rapt audience at the November 2012 National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) Showcase. The field of computational biology is “raining opportunities,” Collins said.