Keck had a big showing at the Deep Carbon Observatory's Third International Meeting in St. Andrews Scotland (March 23-25, 2017). There Bob Hazen, Dan Hummer, Shuanna Morrison, and Ahmed Eleish presented on the latest findings of the Keck Project.
Awesome!
This year's AbSciCon in Tucson, AZ with the theme "Diverse Life and its Detection on Different Worlds", has been a big venue for those on the Keck funded project. Robert Hazen spoke and co-chaired the session "Big Data in Astrobiology", while Shaunna Morrison and Marshall Ma also gave talks. Robert Hazen's talk centered on the findings and next steps in the this project and highlighted the discovery of predicitve 'Big Data' in the geosciences.
On Thursday, May 4th, team members Robert Hazen, Ahmed Eliesh, Chao Liu, Shaunna Morrison, and Mike Meyer presented at the NSF headquaters as part of their 'Distinguished Lecture' series (photo from NSF BIO). Robert Hazen provided the background and main goals of the Keck funded group's work while the others filled in key subject matters (data analytics, the relationship between minerals and paleotectonics, predictive analysis, and paleobiology; respectively). The talk was fully attended and great questions were asked.
Great Job Everyone!
The week of May 21st the Keck Project and the USGS held a workshop titled: 'Mining Data Mining' that aimed to begin a collaboration between the two groups to develop 'Big Data' analytics that could be used to predict new mineral resoruces. The meeting lasted 2.5 days and was attended by 25 participants from 8 different insitutions and 3 contients.
The study by Keck Project scientists, Chao Liu, Andrew H. Knoll, and Robert M. Hazen, on Rodinia has been published in Nature Communications.
Geochemical and mineralogical evidence that Rodinian assembly was unique (doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02095-x)
Keck Project scientists and collaborators Eli K. Moore, Benjamin I. Jelen, Donato Giovannelli, Hagai Raanan, and Paul Falowski published a study entitled "Metal availability and the expanding network of microbial metabolisms in the Archaean eon" in Nature Geoscience.
Abstract:
The Keck DTDI group members from the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic came together with the world's leading expert in uranium mineralogy, Dr. Peter Burns, and his Ph.D. student, Sam Perry to explore their uranium mineral database with advanced analytical and visualization techniques.
We have a very special guest at our meeting: Cadence Boucher - a 6th grade student from Charlottesville, VA. Cadence is interested in mineralogy and has independantly learned JavaScript coding to create network diagrams of the minerals found in each of the counties of Virginia. She will present her results in a science fair in 2019.