Author: Jonathan Sutton

My last two weeks with OneZoom

Phew! These two weeks have been busy. After the difficulties getting the current codebase running on my machine, the last weeks have been much more productive! Here’s a little look at what I’ve been up to.

Science Museum Lates

On the 31st August, I was lucky enough to be offered the chance to be a collaborator in the Science Museum Lates with the rest of the OneZoom team. Our stall was called ‘Big Data and the Family’, and showed how using fractal trees can improve viewing big data. We had two different trees to demonstrate, ranging from a genealogy viewer called ZoomPast (our close family, other humans) to OneZoom’s full evolutionary tree of life (our distant family, the one I’ve been working on).

My first week with OneZoom

Who are OneZoom?

OneZoom are a small up-and-coming charity, founded in 2012, dedicated to providing educational material about evolution. They have developed a tool that allows users to view all species on earth in a huge evolutionary tree (you can see it here: www.onezoom.org/life). It has already been shown at science fairs across the UK, and is now a fixed feature at a number of museums of natural history around the globe. Despite its huge achievements, OneZoom is almost entirely the work of just two people, working in their spare time to make a vast body of knowledge on biodiversity and evolution available to anyone of any age.