BRICS Astronomy and the United Nations Open Universe Initiative.

The almost universal availability of electronic connectivity, portable devices, and the web is bringing about a major revolution: information of all kinds is rapidly becoming accessible to everyone, transforming social, economic and cultural life practically everywhere in the world. Internet technologies represent an unprecedented and extraordinary two-way channel of communication between producers and users of data. "Open Universe" is an initiative proposed to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and currently in implementation under the leadership of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UN-OOSA).

A model of tuberculosis clustering in low incidence countries reveals more transmission in the United Kingdom than the Netherlands between 2010 and 2015.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a public health threat in low TB incidence countries, through a combination of reactivated disease and onward transmission. Using surveillance data from the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands (NL), we demonstrate a simple and predictable relationship between the probability of observing a cluster and its size (the number of cases with a single genotype). We demonstrate that the full range of observed cluster sizes can be described using a modified branching process model with the individual reproduction number following a Poisson lognormal distribution.