We show that a citizen science, self-selected cohort shipping samples through the mail at room temperature recaptures many known microbiome results from clinically collected cohorts and reveals new ones. Of particular interest is integrating n = 1 study data with the population data, showing that the extent of microbiome change after events such as surgery can exceed differences between distinct environmental biomes, and the effect of diverse plants in the diet, which we confirm with untargeted metabolomics on hundreds of samples.

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Rapid growth of genome data provides opportunities for updating microbial evolutionary relationships, but this is challenged by the discordant evolution of individual genes. Here we build a reference phylogeny of 10,575 evenly-sampled bacterial and archaeal genomes, based on a comprehensive set of 381 markers, using multiple strategies. Our trees indicate remarkably closer evolutionary proximity between Archaea and Bacteria than previous estimates that were limited to fewer “core” genes, such as the ribosomal proteins. The robustness of the results was tested with respect to several variables, including taxon and site sampling, amino acid substitution heterogeneity and saturation, non-vertical evolution, and the impact of exclusion of candidate phyla radiation (CPR) taxa. Our results provide an updated view of domain-level relationships.

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We study the head-on collision of two equal mass, nonrotating black holes. We consider a range of cases from holes surrounded by a common horizon to holes initially separated by about 20M , where M is the mass of each hole. We determine the waveforms and energies radiated for both the ℓ = 2 and ℓ = 4 waves resulting from the collision. In all cases studied the normal modes of the final black hole dominate the spectrum. We also estimate analytically the total gravitational radiation emitted, taking into account the tidal heating of horizons using the membrane paradigm, and other effects. For the first time we are able to compare analytic calculations, black hole perturbation theory, and strong field, nonlinear numerical calculations for this problem, and we find excellent agreement.PACS numbers: 04.30.+x, 95.30.Sf Typeset Using REVTEX

The CAMERA (Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis) community database for metagenomic data deposition is an important first step in developing methods for monitoring microbial communities.

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