When coffee is sold as single origin or as the more expensive Arabica beans— do you really know whether you are getting what you’re paying for? Different coffee-producing regions need to enforce the standards and reputation of their coffee, and there is a growing industry looking at different technologies to more accurately classify and test coffee beans from different origins.

I used to be on Quora. I’m not anymore. But I used to be. And I wrote some answers. Here are some of my favourites, categorised by field… sort of. AI If I wrote an AI and trained it to score 200 on a standardized IQ test, what could a human of 100 IQ still do better? Read the full answer here. Will true AI come before the ability to completely simulate a human brain? Is there a difference? Read the full answer here.

The 12th international meeting on Visualizing Biological Data took place on March 16–18, 2022 (AKA VIZBI 2022). This conference is always a visual treat, and with its focus on transforming how Life Scientists view data from Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biomedical Science this year’s event was no exception.

GigaScience has always had a focus on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, and it can be challenging for our reviewers to judge this, especially now that more and more tools are being created – bringing data science to the masses.  This also means more efficiency and ease is required especially when multiple collaborators and contributors on a specific project are involved.

Open Data in the Third Dimension Data are not just ephemeral units of magnetisation sitting on computer hard drives. The linking of the word to storable computer information only goes back to the mid-20 ^th century, but the use of the latin word data in English goes back to at least the 17 ^th Century.

GigaScience Press and River Valley Technologies, with the help of Stencila, launch their first interactive “ Executable Research Article ” from their new scientific journal, GigaByte.

The SAMtools suite of tools for manipulating sequencing data one of the most ubiquitous tools in bioinformatics, as the “glue” holding together much of bioinformatics we see it used in pretty much every genomics pipeline we are submitted.

The first comprehensive mobile genome analysis application, iGenomics, is now available for download and use on an iOS smartphone . By pairing an smartphone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users will be able to create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the Star Trek’s “tricorder”. Just published is an article presenting  iGenomics, the first DNA sequencing toolkit that can run on a smartphone.

Meetings In the Time of Coronavirus: Conferences go Viral June-July usually marks peak conference season when the GigaScience team is on the road, but with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down travel and public gatherings it has been a strangely static summer.

It’s DNA day, celebrating two historic milestones: The publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the completion of the human genome project in 2003.