A prototype online platform that uses real-time visualization and viral genome data to track the spread of global pathogens such as Zika and Ebola is the grand prize winner of the Open Science Prize. The international team competition is an initiative by the National Institutes of Health, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). The winning team, Real-time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation, created its nextstrain.org prototype to pool data from researchers across the globe, perform rapid phylogenetic analysis, and post the results on the platform’s website...
One of the world's top cardiologists says that many of the major nutrition guidelines have no good basis in science. "I'm not a nutrition scientist and that may be an advantage because every week in the newspaper we read something is good for you and the same thing the next week is bad for you," said Salim Yusuf, MD, DPhil, (McMaster University), at Cardiology Update 2017, a symposium presented by the European Society of Cardiology and the Zurich Heart House...
Percona, the company that delivers enterprise-class MySQL® and MongoDB® solutions and services, today announced that the conference session schedule for the sixth annual Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2017, taking place April 24-27, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Santa Clara Convention Center. Sponsorship opportunities are still available, and Advance Registration Discounts can be purchased through March 5, 2017, 11:30 p.m. PST. The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara has a block of rooms reserved for attendees until March 23, but they are going fast...
A research team from the United States and Canada has developed and successfully tested new computational software that determines whether a human DNA sample includes an epigenetic add-on linked to cancer and other adverse health conditions. In the Feb. 20 issue of the journal Nature Methods, team members from Johns Hopkins University, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Toronto detailed their promising new method of detecting the presence of an extra mark on DNA called cytosine methylation...
“Everyone is doing sequencing, but most people aren’t able to analyze their sequences as well or as quickly as they might want to,” Bedford said. “We’re trying to fill in this gap so that the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — or whoever — can have better analysis tools to do what they do. We’re hoping that will get our software in the hands of a lot of people”...
The Department of Defense (DoD) announced the launch of Code.mil, an open source initiative that allows software developers around the world to collaborate on unclassified code written by federal employees in support of DoD projects. DoD is working with GitHub, an open source platform, to experiment with fostering more collaboration between private sector software developers and federal employees on software projects built within the DoD. The Code.mil URL redirects users to an online repository that will house code written for a range of projects across DoD for individuals to review and make suggested changes...