Bridge House Restoration

Bridge House was severely neglected for years since its creation. Our team’s primary objective was to rejuvenate the structure and once again make it a priority destination for the public when visiting the Experimental Structures Laboratory. With this goal in mind, we replaced the plywood barricades with guard railings designed and fabricated by the team to complement those installed on the structure by the previous group. With the elimination of the plywood barricades, the Bridge House could once again be a sense of pride in the rich historical landscape of our Cal Poly community. In addition, our team hoped to gain more knowledge and experience in working in an interdisciplinary group. An important goal for us was to have an experience that mimicked a true construction project. Throughout the experience, we expected collaboration between each discipline from the pre-construction phase through the final closeout of the structure. We aimed to embrace the Cal Poly spirit of learn by doing, by designing, welding and installing the guardrails around the structure by hand. At the end of this project, we hoped the team would gain experience in the collaboration of design, scheduling, budgeting, welding and manufacturing

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead