I'm a mechanical / electrical design engineer, specializing in rapid prototyping for startups. I'm also a mildly addicted Manifold Markets user and peaked at #8 on the trader leaderboard. I'm excited about the impact potential of Open Source Hardware, and I like to think of problems in terms of incentive alignment. I currently work for Burnbot, a wildfire protection company, and previously worked in 3D printing, drones, vertical hydroponic farming, and Augmented Reality optics. If you know of any interesting EA hardware engineering projects, particularly in biorisk mitigation, please reach out!
This was a very informative! I was familiar with NAO, but I had no idea how low the RNA concentration is of respiratory viruses in wastewater, and how much that drives up the cost of sequencing. How do indoor aerosol samples compare? Seems like air sampling of indoor public spaces might be promising, I found a couple papers demonstrating that detecting pathogens via airborne MGS sequencing is possible but none gave relative abundance numbers.