With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to store an unlimited amount of information.

The latest installment from the Portal Project Blog on the watch for Banner-tailed Kangaroo Rats

How did we get those daily pics of the desert turning green in a week? Meet Portal’s new toy: the Phenocam.

Ever wondered how fast the desert can turn green when the rains get going? There’s a Portal blog post on that (with pics)!

A guest post from last week on the Portal Blog about studying Kangaroo rat placentas!

We have a modest sized group of current folks at ESA this week presenting on all the cool things they’ve been doing. We’re also around and always happy to try to find time to grab a coffee or just a few minutes to chat science. Our schedule for the week is: Monday Get a double dose of rapid change in ecological communities from the Portal Project with Morgan Ernest and Erica Christensen. 02:50 PM – 03:10 PM in C120-121.

At the end of this year, our amazing postdoc Axel is going back to Argentina to start his own lab. This means we are looking for a new postdoc to start next year. Earliest starting date is February 11, 2018.

As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet (I started reading primary scientific literature for a high-school project around 1989), I have closely followed its digitization.

Every summer we celebrate our birthday at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, and this was a particularly memorable and important one – being the 5 ^th birthday of GigaScience, and 25 ^th edition of the ISMB.

The Portal Project turns 40 this year! In celebration, we will be regularly posting about the history of the site, new things going on, natural history of the desert, and other fun things over at the Portal Blog.