SAVING SOFTWARE
The 1981 Atari 8-bit video game Eastern Front (1941), based on Germany's assault on Russia in World War II, is on Stanford's list of important things to save. It's among 15,000 software titles in the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, maintained by the University libraries.
Like published material, software needs archiving and safeguarding, hence Stanford's new partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to preserve the Cabrinety holdings. Funded by the National Software Reference Library, the two-year project will capture disk images that are exact copies of the data from the original software.
The mission is about more than preserving the evolutionary record of software and technology, says Henry Lowood, curator for the history of science and technology collections. "The history of our culture has become impossible to understand without understanding the roles played by computer software in business, entertainment, education and many other realms."
BIOENGINEER RECEIVES $1.5 MILLION GRANT
Markus Covert, assistant professor of bioengineering, foresees a future in which "computer-aided design becomes as pervasive a presence in biology as it already is in other engineering disciplines."
Covert's work is getting a boost from a $1.5 million exploratory grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Covert's research involves constructing complex computer models of living organisms; last year he completed the first whole-cell computer model of a simple bacterium. The award, Covert notes, "is going to enable us to develop new computational frameworks to ac-count for biological control. This will be a critical step in modeling more complex organisms, but also for modeling the effects of genome design."
ASPIRIN AND MELANOMA
Researchers at the School of Medicine report that women who took aspirin regularly reduced their risk of skin cancer, and that the longer they took it, the lower the risk.
Described as the largest study to explore new ways of preventing melanoma, the findings showed that those taking aspirin reduced their risk of developing the disease by an average of 21 percent. The risk decreased by 11 percent at one year, 22 percent between one and four years and as much as 30 percent at five years and more.
The researchers noted that more information is necessary to understand aspirin's role. "We don't know how much aspirin should be taken, or for how long, to be most effective," said Jean Tang, assistant professor of dermatology and the study's senior author.
The study was published online in the journal Cancer. The lead author was Stanford medical student Christina Gamba.
