Gemma Hall has crocheted a woolly bug in the process of being bashed! Love it.
If anyone wants to craft any bugs, whether being bashed or not, we’d be very happy to post images and Tweet about it!
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Author: Philip Fowler
Philip W Fowler is a computational biophysicist studying antimicrobial resistance working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Thanks to the hard work and persistence of all our volunteer scientists, BashTheBug reached one million classifications around noon on Tuesday 2 October!
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A photo of everyone
In total, we’ve done 974,283 classifications. Which means ONE MILLION isn’t too far away.
Two weeks ago exactly, I posted a small update on how we were doing; how classifications had been done by our volunteers etc. Then three days later, on Thu 9 August, the Zooniverse team sent a short email about BashTheBug to all the registered Zooniverse users.
Until now we have simply sent all the images of each M. tuberculosis sample growing on each and every of the 14 antibiotics out to be classified by the citizen scientists. A while ago we realised that some images are “easy” in the sense that all the volunteers we show it to all give exactly the same answer. So, with a bit of work behind the scenes, we’ve written some computer code that can detect where the wells are in each image and then measure the amount of growth in each well. Now, it is isn’t perfect; it can be confused by small amounts of growth and artefacts like air bubbles and shadows, but it does mean we can confidently filter out the relatively easy images, thereby allowing us to only send the more challenging cases to you, our volunteers.
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August 2018 update
It has been a while since I updated everyone on how BashTheBug is going.
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OxfordSparks podcast
If you want to know about how BashTheBug is helping tackle tuberculosis and fits into the international CRyPTIC research project, listen to this podcast by OxfordSparks where you can hear interviews with Philip Fowler as well as the leading BashTheBug volunteer, ElisabethB.
Check out the work of my friend Lucy Turner who has created some textile designs based on various tuberculosis objects (if you look carefully you can see some based on the 96-well plates we classify).
This public event comprised three talks, each about 15-25 minutes long. Videos of each talk can be found on YouTube, links below.
BashTheBug has just got back from the recent European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Madrid, Spain. You can see some descriptive analysis of the first-dataset on this poster (free to access).