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Bioconda: A sustainable and comprehensive software distribution for the life sciences

Publishing date: 2017-10-27 Published on: bioRxiv summary: Björn Grüning and colleagues here present Bioconda (https://bioconda.github.io), a distribution of bioinformatics software for the lightweight, multi-platform and language-agnostic package manager Conda. Currently, Bioconda offers a collection of over 3000 software packages, which is continuously maintained, updated, and extended by a growing global community of more than 200 contributors.

Imagining the “open” university: Sharing scholarship to improve research and education

Publishing date: 2017-10-24 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Open scholarship, such as the sharing of articles, code, data, and educational resources, has the potential to improve university research and education as well as increase the impact universities can have beyond their own walls.

Ethoscopes: An open platform for high-throughput ethomics

Publishing date: 2017-10-19 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: This design is a rig for high-throughput behavioural experiments with genetically amenable model species such as fruit flies. At its core, it is a webcam (RPi camera) focussed at a set of interchangable behavioural arena arrays for parallel recording of multiple aninals at once.

Episode 44: Leading the automation revolution

Publishing date: 2017-10-10 Published on: Podtail summary: In this episode Science: Disrupt chatted to Kristin Ellis, the Scientific Development Lead at OpenTrons, about all things science. OpenTrons is a company that builds affordable open-source lab robots, that remove the need to perform tedious manual pipetting tasks, to free up valuable time for researchers.

A programmable optical stimulator for the Drosophila eye

Publishing date: 2017-10-01 Published on: HardwareX summary: A programmable optical stimulator for Drosophila eyes is presented. The target application of the stimulator is to induce retinal degeneration in fly photoreceptor cells by exposing them to light in a controlled manner.

Open-source automated external defibrillator

Publishing date: 2017-10-01 Published on: HardwareX summary: The Automated External Defibrillator (AED) is a medical device that analyzes a patient’s electrocardiogram in order to establish whether he/she is suffering from the fatal condition of Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), and subsequently allows the release of a therapeutic dose of electrical energy (i.

MRIQC: Advancing the automatic prediction of image quality in MRI from unseen sites

Publishing date: 2017-09-25 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: This paper presents the MRI Quality Control tool (MRIQC), a tool for extracting quality measures and fitting a binary (accept/exclude) classifier. The results show that the tool performs with high accuracy in intra-site prediction, but performance on unseen sites leaves space for improvement

What is the “Source” of Open Source Hardware?

Publishing date: 2017-09-05 Published on: Journal of Open Hardware summary: Based on analysis of public documentation of 132 products, this paper provides an overview of how practitioners tend to interpret the concept of open source hardware.

Free and open-source automated 3-D microscope

Publishing date: 2017-08-01 Published on: Appropedia summary: This paper presents a low-cost, open-source microscope 3-D stage. A RepRap 3-D printer was converted to an optical microscope equipped with a customized, 3-D printed holder for a USB microscope.

Open-source mobile water quality testing platform

Publishing date: 2017-08-01 Published on: Appropedia summary: This project details an open source water testing platform derived from the open-source colorimeter, which is made from open source electronics and 3-D printable components.