This week in GigaScience we published a new genomic analysis of the endangered Oriental Stork, bringing good news: The population’s genetic health is still surprisingly strong, with high genetic diversity and low levels of inbreeding. Climate change, forest wildfires, hunting and the expansion of agriculture, industry and other human activities threaten the Oriental Stork ( Ciconia boyciana ), which is listed as

Reaching new highs in Cannabis sativa Omics There is a growing interest in Cannabis (Cannabis sativa) research, and recent changes in regulations have spurred numerous genomic studies of this once-prohibited plant. Industrial hemp and medical marijuana are now global multibillion-dollar industries, but due to its widespread prohibition in the 20th and early 21st century it […]

The post Getting deep into the weeds of Cannabis genomics: Join our first Cassyni Seminar appeared first on GigaBlog.

GigaScience Press is helping CitizenScience.Asia mobilise Citizen Scientists Across Asia for a groundbreaking biodiversity initiative from October 18 to 27 2024. Regular readers will have seen our efforts to promote and amplify citizen science projects, citizen science being a key driver of “Open Engagement of Societal Actors”, which was highlighted by UNESCO as one of the four fundamental pillars of Open Science (and flagged

Interested in understanding how ecological systems change through time? Morgan Ernest’s Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student to start Fall 2025. The new student will work with our long-term field site in Portal, Arizona to study biodiversity dynamics of mammals and plants to understand and predict changes in species abundances and biodiversity in response to changing climate and biotic conditions.

It has been almost 10 years now that we have come to the realization that a particular type of our operant experiments can be classified as motor learning. In such “operant self-learning” experiments, the animal learns about the consequences of its own behavior and adjusts future behavior accordingly.

(Blog post) “MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier” by Cory Doctorow. This blog post is about the collective action problem of moving academic publishing away from the big corporate publishers that extract millions of dollars/year from scholarly research while contributing very little in return. It reports on an encouraging report by SPARC about MIT’s success in canceling their Elsevier subscriptions.

Watch a DOME Webinar on Machine Learning Best Practices & Recommendations on 24th September 2024 In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in scientific publications in journals publishing computational research such as ours utilising Machine Learning (ML). This represents a significant challenge for disseminating and assessing scientific research as the black box and […]

The post Machine Learning Standards in the Wild. DOME Webinar on ML Recommendations and Applications appeared first on GigaBlog.

In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from the laboratory of Carolina Rezaval in Birmingham studied a decision-making process in male Drosophila fruit flies where the reasons for each decision seemed apparent.

Ethan White’s lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student starting in Fall 2025 to study ecological forecasting of wading birds in the Everglades.

GigaScience’s T2T Series has now launched, with our first papers showcasing new Telomere-to-Telomere methods and genomic data sets. While the first draft of the Human Genome was declared complete in April 2003, it took a further two decades for the publication of the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome in March 2022.