Bioinformatics is a science that uses numbers and computers to work on problems about living things. The famous job is reading the human genome — the full set of gene information in our cells — which is far too long for a person to check by hand. People in this field write programs, store huge files of DNA letters, compare them, and look for patterns that might explain an illness or how a kind of living thing has changed. It sits between biology and computer science: a lab still grows the samples, but a lot of the hard looking happens on a screen. You will meet it in universities, hospitals, and drug companies, in a formal, scientific voice. Though actually, some scientists draw a line between bioinformatics (handling and comparing the data) and computational biology (building models of how life works). Other people use the two names as if they were the same. If you are starting out, treat this word as biology done with computers and maths.