Aaron Darling, faculty member of University of Technology Sydney (who used to work with me here at UC Davis) has a very important and interesting read on his blog: Not so fast, FastTree. In it he discusses some informatics archaeology he did (digging around in some code) regading the program FastTree which many researchers have been using …
Really interesting and distressing story in the New York Times a few days about: A Luxury Liner Docks and the Countdowns On by Jad Mouawad. So many parts of this story have microbe-themed angles. Some interesting tidbits (quoted from the story) A treatment system handles all the wastewater generated by the passengers and crew. That system, which …
We will be hosting a screening of “Resistance the film” at UC Davis. April 9, 2015 6: 00 PM (reception from 6:00-6:30) Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility Auditorium Davis, CA The filmmaker Michael Graziano will be there. Reviews have been very positive. See for example Washington Post Slate Vox WIRED See the first two minutes of …
In this week’s Best of MicrobiomeDigest, we’ll look at the effect of a “sea voyage” on the human oral and belly button microbiome. For those of you who are not familiar with Fisherman’s Friend (I am not sure if these are as popular in the rest of the world as they are in parts of Europe), it’s a British …
Really nice collection in the journal RNA for their 20th anniversary. So many interesting things here on the RNA world, RNA ctalysis, RNA structure, RNA function and more. Although all of these papers in some way relate to the work I do on sequencing and analyzing microbial genomes and metagenomes, a few of of particular …
Microbiomes are everywhere. Not only inside and around us, but also in the scientific literature. Not too many years ago, only a handful of microbiology laboratories were analyzing the composition of the invisible communities that surround us. Today, it feels as if every other scientist is doing something microbiome-related. New techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and …
SciPy 2015 (Scientific Computing with Python) is coming up in Austin, TX this July 6-12. I attended SciPy last year for the first time to present on scikit-bio (see my talk here), and thought it was an excellent meeting. It was great to spend a week talking about software and software development, which isn’t the …
Just a quick note to say that the final version of “Gut Check: The Microbiome” Game has been released here on microBEnet. Here’s the summary from the website: Gut Check is a game for 2-4 players where each player attempts to develop a healthy microbiome while interfering with the microbiomes of their opponents. Give your …
An important part of science is owning up to mistakes and doing the best to correct them. A couple months ago we got data from the International Space Station where we had grown up bacteria for our “Microbial Playoffs”. After analyzing the the data we blogged about the winners and disbursed the results far and …
Wow. This is one of the worst germophobia driven articles I have seen in a long long time: 7 Everyday Items That Are Harboring Germs. Brought to you from GrandParents.Com — by Linda Rodgers — and posted at the Huffington Post. This one is loaded with really just silly stuff like: “But there’s a slew of stuff …