Science Market Update

Big Data Initiative Launches Genomic Research Records on Amazon Cloud

Posted by Jaimee Saliba on Wed, Apr 04, 2012

The 1000 Genomes Project is an international genomic research and data collection effort that has produced "a deep catalog of human genetic variation" for public research use. Now, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the White House's recently-announced Big Data Research and Development Initiative, the 1000 Genomes data is available gratis on the AWS cloud.  In reality, there are over 1700 genome profiles in the demographically-diverse study, and all that data takes up about 200 terabytes of memory, according to a New York Times article on the cloud bonanza. So even though researchers could download the data free to their own computers from 1000 Genomes directly before, it's something you really don't want to do, even if you have that kind of memory (re: 200TB).  Instead, you'll likely be better off accessing the data through AMS and paying them to crunch numbers for you, which probably explains why AWS has decided to engage in this bit of philanthropy.  Future profit, plus their preeminence as a computational resource in the brave new world of Big Data.

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Tags: CA, 2013, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, genomic research, Southwest, 2012, Berkeley, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Genomics, NIH, biotech solutions, NSF, National Lab, UC Berkeley, UCBerk

Science Research Finds Innovative Crowdfunding Resource at Petridish.org

Posted by Jaimee Saliba on Fri, Mar 16, 2012


In the David and Goliath world of science research funding, young scientists who lack the experience and PI status to pull in funding from sources like the NIH and NSF now have a new resource at petridish.org.  The website, just launched in a beta version, allows scientists to appeal to ordinary folk for funding to support their research, with typically modest goals of $10,000 or less. The nine projects that debuted on petridish.org are almost all led by PhD candidates, post-docs, and staff researchers from top universities, and most are looking to travel to do data collection for life science projects.  These could be tomorrow's big names in science research, getting innovative about moving their research forward now. 

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Tags: 2012 Research Funding, crowdsourcing, biology research, Funding, Science Projects, science research, biotech solutions, innovative solution, scientist solutions, early career funding, science research funding

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