This grant to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) supports seven field studies, including the extraction and analysis of deep Earth drilling cores, at seven sites around the globe. Sample types and locations include: Hydrocarbons and microbes from fluids, Canadian Shield (Ontario, Canada); Surface-collected, carbon-bearing sediments and carbonate reefs, North Pole Dome (Western Australia); Hydrocarbons and deep microbes recovered from drilling, Songliao Basin (Northeastern China); High-pressure metamorphic rocks, graphite, and carbonates, Alpine Corsica (France); Possibly abiotic hydrocarbons recovered from drilling, Romashkino oil field (Tatarstan, Russia); (Sub)seafloor methane hydrates (clathrates), water-column methane, Eastern Siberian Arctic Ocean Seafloor; Altered ocean crust and mantle, Samail ophiolite (Oman). Sites were selected through a year-long collaborative process involving the entire DCO community.  Together with cores already in repositories, new samples from these sites will complement the two dozen other locations where researchers are already working (such as volcanoes) in a way that DCO leaders believe will allow the program to achieve its decadal goals. 

Github, the collaborative software development and versioning platform, has become so essential to the software development ecosystem that scientists have begun experimenting with using it for the collaborative versioning and sharing of datasets.  Though the potential value is immense, Github was designed to handle software code containing thousands of lines per file, not tabular datasets containing millions of entries.  Large datasets of the kind regularly used by scientists grinds the system to a halt.  Moreover, tabular data, unlike textual software code, might exist in any one of myriad data formats ranging from comma?separated to Excel to SQL.  Funds from this grant provide support for the development of a solution to this problem, a Git-esque platform called “Dat.”  Created by open source developer Max Ogden, Dat borrows heavily from Github’s syntax and mechanics, but is optimized for large-scale tabular data and has been programmed to be able to translate seamlessly between  the wide variety of formats commonly used to store data.   Grant funds will support the hiring of two developers: one focused on core development and one focused on providing interfaces useful to researchers and on ensuring the system’s interoperability with existing scientific data repositories. Additional funds will support outreach and partnership building with stakeholders in the scientific community.

Since 2011, the Mozilla Foundation, developer of the popular Firefox web browser, has hosted a series of “Software Carpentry” boot camps developed by computer scientist Greg Wilson to teach basic software engineering practices to researchers who in a professional capacity were writing code to manage data but had never received any formal software development training.  The project has been a success.  Interest in the boot camps has been robust both in the U.S. and Europe and Mozilla has expanded their effort into a larger project, called the Open Science Lab,  aimed at collaborating with the scientific community to develop open source tools and other resources to aid in scientific research and collaboration.  Funds from this grant provide continued operational support to Mozilla for this project.

The foundational treaty of the global nuclear order, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), does not define what constitutes a nuclear weapon and therefore what activities, technologies, and materials should be regarded as evidence that a state is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. This lack of definition exacerbates the nonproliferation challenge of distinguishing between legitimate nuclear activities (be they peaceful or military applications such as naval propulsion) and illegitimate ones (namely, those oriented toward nuclear weapons). This challenge, in turn, exacerbates the difficulty of promoting the peaceful spread of nuclear energy while preventing weapons proliferation. This grant provides continued support to an initiative by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to build an international, science-based, de-politicized consensus around how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate nuclear activity as defined by the NPT. Funds will support preparation for an international meeting of stakeholders in Beijing in 2014, finalization of technical documentation, the identification of use-cases and potential applications of the new identification regime, and outreach and communication efforts aimed at garnering broad international support.