Workshop on Planetary Protection Knowledge Gaps for Human Extraterrestrial Missions (Intro)

reposted from jennomics.com http://www.nasa.gov/ames/events/ppw2015workshop/#.VRMLLJPF8mU I’m at a NASA Ames workshop this week. The goal is to have a discussion about planetary protection with respect to human spaceflight, in particular to Mars, mostly during a “sample and return” mission and a little bit about human habitation on Mars. I’m tweeting with #planetaryprotection. There’s also live streaming here: …

SciPy 2015 Computational Life and Medical Sciences Mini-Symposium: Call for Abstracts

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 …

Microbial sampling in building surveys: what and why are we sampling?

Following the last posts about sampling in buildings and other man-made environments, I would like to share the paper I will present at Healthy Buildings 2015 Europe. The paper mainly focuses on sampling advice for practitioners, but we have also tried to explain what the concept of «building microbiome» means to us. Although buildings are not living …

Session Report: Citizen Microbiology at Citizen Science 2015

A couple of weeks ago in San Jose was the inaugural meeting of the Citizen Science Association, “Citizen Science 2015“.   I previously posted my thoughts on day one here at microBEnet. On day 2, Holly Menninger, Jenna Lang, and I organized a session entitled “Citizen Microbiology: Engaging the public in the study of invisible life”.   …

Sloan Foundation funds an Indoor Microbiome Workshop in Finland

The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has approved a grant to organize a workshop on indoor microbiome in Finland in Fall 2015.  The workshop is designed for a scientific exchange including a workshop and researcher exchanges that will bridge the Sloan grantees in US and Canada with the research groups in Finland and neighboring countries.  The workshop organizing committee, …

Day 1 Report from “Citizen Science 2015” conference

I’m currently attending the inaugural conference of the Citizen Science Association… “Citizen Science 2015“.   Over 650 participants from around the world have arrived in San Jose to talk about all the various flavors and implications of citizen science.   It’s been a fascinating conference so far, not least because there’s very little agreement on what the …