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Interesting piece in NYT today, highlight some of the cutting edge work here in Aus, leveraging new genomic tools for desperately needed conservation interventions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/science/australia-wildlife-assisted-evolution.html
Check out the latest paper from our group (and Nikki’s 1st publication from her excellent MRes thesis!). In this study, she used spatial capture-recapture data to test whether social structure in mouse populations is correlated with the tendency to outbreak. Well done Nikki! #mouseplague
My story about how telematics data from people's cars unexpectedly raised their insurance rates is on the front page today...
... and this is where it started: me lurking on car forums and seeing comments like this.
If this story doesn't convince lawmakers we need a strong federal privacy law, I'm not sure what will.
*Edit:*
I want to express my thanks and appreciation for all the boosts and comments! I had no idea this would get spread so widely, and I'm humbled by the support.
I'll reply to this post with the plan that I have for the next session.
Original post below...
I'm volunteering at my daughter's elementary school by teaching a "coding club" for 5th graders during their lunch and afternoon recess.
It mostly went great, except I left nearly in tears...
One of the kiddos that joined is blind, and I discovered that the coding programs for kids don't appear to be accessible *at all*.
First we tried Swift Playgrounds, but that didn't seem to work with VoiceOver. Then, he said that he's liked ScratchJr. in the past, and he got frustrated with that because he couldn't get his cat to move.
I'm kinda at a loss for how to help him. He left crying because he thinks that he can't get it, but I'm sure he can. Does anyone have any advice?
Thanks!!
I am a guest editor on this Special Feature of Methods in Ecology and Evolution:
Conservation, Ecology and Artificial Intelligence: Advances and Symbiotic Solutions
Accepting proposals until December 1! Please boost!
Xuechun Feng, Nicky Faber, and I are hosting a session at the International Congress of Entomology in Kyoto, Japan 24-28 August 2024. Our session is “Genetic Population Engineering for Pest Management” under the “Pest Management” topic.
We welcome submission of abstracts, which opens on September 1st (https://ice2024.org/call-for-paper/). Gene drive and anything else related to genetic control would fit in well at our session. Looking forward to a good conference!
Invasive species cost Australian economy $25b every year
Our latest work out now in @PLOS ONE on applying more efficient genotyping techniques for #populationgenetics analyses to support research on #mouseplague in Australia
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288701
The management of invasive species has been greatly enhanced by population genetic analyses of multilocus single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) datasets that provide critical information regarding pest population structure, invasion pathways, and reproductive biology. For many applications there is a need for protocols that offer rapid, robust and efficient genotyping on the order of hundreds to thousands of SNPs, that can be tailored to specific study populations and that are scalable for long-term monitoring schemes. Despite its status as a model laboratory species, there are few existing resources for studying wild populations of house mice (Mus musculus spp.) that strike this balance between data density and laboratory efficiency. Here we evaluate the utility of a custom targeted capture genotyping-by-sequencing approach to support research on plaguing house mouse populations in Australia. This approach utilizes 3,651 hybridization capture probes targeting genome-wide SNPs identified from a sample of mice collected in grain-producing regions of southeastern Australia genotyped using a commercially available microarray platform. To assess performance of the custom panel, we genotyped wild caught mice (N = 320) from two adjoining farms and demonstrate the ability to correctly assign individuals to source populations with high confidence (mean >95%), as well as robust kinship inference within sites. We discuss these results in the context of proposed applications for future genetic monitoring of house mice in Australia.
Kashmir Hill
Kees van der Leun
hpux735
Blair Costelloe
Jackson_Champer
Carl Zimmer
