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Abstract Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a significant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records contain irreplaceable information about long-term evolutionary and non-evolutionary changes in our Universe, and their preservation and digitization is vital. Unfortunately, most of those data risk becoming degraded and thence totally lost. We hereby call upon the astronomical community and US funding agencies to recognize the gravity of the situation, and to commit to an international preservation and digitization efforts through comprehensive long-term planning supported by adequate resources, prioritizing where the expected scientific gains, vulnerability of the originals and availability of relevant infrastructure so dictates. The importance and urgency of this issue has been recognized recently by General Assembly XXX of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in its Resolution B3: "on preservation, digitization and scientific exploration of historical astronomical data". We outline the rationale of this promotion, provide examples of new science through successful recovery efforts, and review the potential losses to science if nothing it done. The preservation of astronomy’s historical data is critical for understanding our changing Universe, but those data are at increasing risk of becoming lost. Concerted efforts are needed urgently by the entire astronomical community to ensure that that does not happen. The data must be transformed digitally so that they can be accessible and used for the benefit of scientific exploration and thence of society.
We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.