Not only epidemics themselves come in waves, also research into emerging infectious diseases has ups and downs, a Gigascience paper published today reports. The authors at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev analysed more than 35 million papers and explored research (scientometric trends) related to nine different infectious diseases.

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.

Montréal was the venue for Medical Imaging with Deep Learning 2020 (MIDL 2020) that took place on 6-9 July 2020. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, like many meetings this year (such as the ISMB conference we attend every year), the new normal has been to make it a virtual conference.

Bats are mammals like no other – airborne, mostly nocturnal, often hidden away in caves, capable of using echolocation for in-flight navigation. No two bat species are alike, however. Their diversity of morphology, life styles and feeding habits is staggering. New bat genomics research published today in GigaScience explores

C19RapidReview: cross publisher collaboration against the coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new urgency to openly and rapidly share and review relevant research, with the world looking to science to solve the problems we currently face. While we’ve written about constructive things you can do while in lockdown, there are many more things you can’t do while locked out of the lab.

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.

***With ongoing the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic providing us with unprecedented insight into the progression of a disease outbreak, and unprecedented time in the lock down to turn us all into armchair epidemiologists. This includes near real-time sharing and analysis of genomics data through platforms like nextstrain, and of ways to view the infection, mortality and testing statistics via a growing number of online dashboards.

This week we showcased a new way of peer reviewing software, testing code in an independent manner and providing a CODECHECK “certificate of reproducible computation” when the results in the paper can be reproduced.

Out today in GigaScience is ShinyLearner, a new tool to make it easier to perform benchmark comparisons of classification algorithms. This tool stands out by making this process super systematic and reproducible, and despite needing to interface with many different libraries and languages it uses software containers (and a CodeOcean demo) so end users don’t need to worry about this complexity.

Stuck indoors and bored of passively reading information on the coronavirus (and more) when you could be doing something more constructive? GigaScience now has hypothes.is integration for collaborative annotation, and we would encourage readers to interact with our content more collaboratively.