Tomorrow, Baltimore’s newest (only?) “bio-space” is hosting a hands-on synthetic biology workshop. BUGSS is not a group I’m associated with, but that may change soon, because it looks like they are having tons of fun. With a bit of lab equipment and some e.coli, these guys are hosting some 18+ and all-ages workshops to expose more people to actual molecular biology experiments. I wish this type of thing existed when I was in high-school.
Recently I gave a presentation about Galaxy, and as part of the presentation I walked about 30 people through setting up a Galaxy cluster through Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS setup took most of an hour, and moving 30 people through each step was painful. From pain comes prosperity (apparently), because today I stumbled on a link from the main Galaxy public server that allows a user to automatically initialize a Galaxy cluster through AWS! Where were you last month? Anyway, I’ve updated the presentation with a link to the site. I’ve not tested this method of Cloudman Galaxy initialization, but I’m assuming it should work really well.