Comment by alexpotato
4 hours ago
> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
If labs want samples like that they should start a scheme, I’d be happy to mail in random stuff.
Same! Ready to send random samples from Sheffield
We'll likely have robots sampling all over the world's diverse biomes in some short years.
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Reminds me of penicillin research, where random cantaloupe from Peoria yielded the best penicillin mold.