There is a new paper out that may be of interest to many: “When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement”. It discusses an analysis of paleogenetics and the open science / open data practices in the field. This seems like it could be of relevance to the …
Dear metagenome method developers, The first challenge of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) begins right now! Over the last three months, we received valuable feedback from the community playing with our toy data sets. We incorporated many of your suggestions, thanks again! Today, we proudly release the official data sets …
Wow – this is really really cool: Hidden Life Forms: Investigating Microbial Diversity on Our Bodies and in Our Homes. The article is by Jennifer Cutraro and it goes through a series of course / learning activities regarding microbial diversity – of homes and of people. It has things like: a warm up activity a pre-activity …
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: …
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 …
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 …