In the data driven era, not only in research but in our day-to-day lives, people are creating more and more personal digitized data that enables human-participant research in social sciences and personalized medicine. However, with numerous data streams and types this raises concerns such as how to merge and share such data, as well as ethical problems.

“ To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge ” is the slogan for Hypothes.is, a open annotation layer that allows anyone to annotate anything.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have shrunk the science budgets able to properly take advantage of this. At least in the case of non-medical research.

Gamers to join ash dieback fight-back Next time you sit next to someone on the train playing a game on their smartphone don’t be too dismissive. They may be harnessing the most state of the art genomics technology in the fight to save Northern Europe’s woodlands from destruction.

The BBSRC has just released an excellent video and article on crowdsourcing killer disease outbreaks very relevant to our recent commentary and blog postings on the OpenAshDB (the Ash Dieback disease crowdsourcing) project.

Bye Bye Bluebells Bluebell woods, the dense carpets of violet–blue flowers found in ancient woodland are a spectacular and famous springtime sight in Britain, but this picture postcard scene is threatened as never before.

Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit.

Last week marked two important milestones in the deadly 2011 European E. coli 0104:H4 outbreak: the Robert Koch institute announcing the end of the outbreak, and the publication of several papers from the many groups sequencing the pathogen.

I am constantly intrigued by the way that some sort of collective web-based intelligence seems to cause specific issues to pop up in multiple places at the same time.