Bird Genomes Rule the Roost Yesterday marked the announcement by Guojie Zhang (pictured) in Nature of the launch of the Bird 10,000 genomes (B10K) project (see: http://b10k.genomics.cn/), an initiative to generate representative draft genome sequences from all bird species within the next five years. This ambitious project is the first attempt to sequence the genomes of all living species of a vertebrate class.
All Cats (Microbiomes) are Grey? Regular readers will have seen our interest in “community genome” projects, supported by crowdfunding and alternative means (fashion shows in case of the “peoples parrot”), and we’ve been pleased to see the Azolla fern and Cactus genome projects that we published guest GigaBlog postings from both achieve their funding targets.
This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge Most people aren’t familiar with the challenges of working on a PhD with a disability or chronic illness, and yet there’s a good chance that someone you know is in this situation and isn’t talking about it. This is the first in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness, and about the things that we can do to support our colleagues and students so that they can
With our focus on large-scale biological data, mass spectrometry has been one area of particular interest and attention. Metabolomics involves the detection and quantification of small molecules (metabolites) in living organisms using mass spectrometers.
Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in a long list of demonstration of what they think of the intellectual capacities of their customers. It’s precisely because it is only one in a long row that I initially didn’t feel like commenting.
Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are fundamental prerequisites for evidence-based policies and informed decisions on how to proceed with bitterly needed reforms.
A few months ago Mick Watson wrote an awesome post about How to recruit a good bioinformatician. We’re in the process of hiring a scientific software engineer so I thought I’d use Mick’s post to illustrate why you should come work with us doing scientific software development and data-intensive research, and hopefully provide a concrete demonstration of the sort of things Mick suggests for appealing to talented computational folks.
For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives. As a reader: I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.
My research group is hiring a Scientific Software Engineer to help develop software that facilitates science, contribute to research in data-intensive ecology, and improve scientific research and computing through training and modeling competitions. We are actively involved in data-intensive computational research, open source software development, and open approaches to science.
