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Quote of the Day: The Infrastructure of Terrorism

From The NY Times: Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik's violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam "is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged." "This rhetoric," he added, "is not cost-free." Just another lone wolf, I guess. Of course, Glenn Beck has compared the murdered children to "Hitler Youth."…

Good times

Wait! I'm complaining in that last entry! Sure, I'm exhausted from all my wanderings, but I had a fabulous time in Australia. Allow me to include a few pictures to demonstrate. Here's a nice video from the Sunshine Coast Atheists to give you an idea of the tone of the conference: And really, I spent a lot of time laughing. It's a rough life, being an out atheist. Now I have to go crawl into the shower and then take a nap, just to recover from all the hilarity. And then back to writing, writing, writing, so I have an excuse to do it all again someday.

We have to the technology; we can rebuild the race!

Baby to be born free of breast cancer after embryo screening: The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman's womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant. By screening out embryos carrying the gene, called BRCA-1, the couple, from London, will eliminate the hereditary disease from their lineage. Obviously the headline is hyperbolic in this specific case. Changing probabilities is not necessarily a guarantee. But I think the bigger picture here warrants serious notice. Armand Leroi has outlined the major issues, so I…

I get mail

I'm still experiencing fallout from the cracker incident, like the slow drift of dandruff from the flaking scalp of a gyrating televangelist. The latest is a letter from Mr. E.P. Bruk, who I suspect believes he is making a sarcastic point, but is actually making my point for me…that it is absurd to equate the value of a silly little cracker to a human life, or in this case, an entire ethnic group. To double the irony, he also included a cover letter he sent to the chancellor and president of the university, decrying my loose use of the "F" word and toilet humor.

Public high-school students from San Francisco place take honors in the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition

Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF! These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were: Peking University (China), University of Science and Technology (China), University of Paris (France), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and UC Berkeley. I'm really impressed that these public high school students managed to beat students from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and Princeton, but…

The Young Naturalist Award

Would you like to win a cash prize and maybe an expense paid trip to New York City? If you're in grades 7-12 and like research, you might be interested in the 2009 Young Naturalist contest from the American Museum of Natural History. Winners (2 from each grade) will receive cash awards, from $500 to $2,500, and an all-expense paid trip to New York City to attend the awards ceremony at the Museum. The contest involves investigating questions in ecology, biology, Earth science and astronomy and writing an essay. More information can be found here.

Biotech Expo - the excitement builds

Students, teachers and scientists converge tommorrow morning from all around the Puget Sound region and elsewhere in Washington to share their experiences and talk about science. The students will present posters, science-themed music, art, drama, and many different types of projects that involved first-hand research and investigation. Scientists from the local biotech companies and research institutions talk with the students and judge the projects. The public viewing time is tomorrow, May 28th, between 9 am-12 noon at the Meydenbauer Center. More information can be found here. This…

Why do Republicans hate America and the Earth?

This is a bit long but you will benefit from watching all of it. It gets extra hot at 31:30. I love the look on that woman's face at 31:38 and again at 31:47. LOL. This particular member of congress, Don Young from Alaska, needs to get unelected. Frank J. Vondersaar seems to be the guy running against him, and this seems to be his web site. You can donate money to help Frank's campaign here. I was originally made aware of this testimony from a blog post at Get Energy Smart blog, HERE. Please go check that out.

Quote of the week

Mike the Mad Biologist wins a gold star for this quote that I'll be stealing: The other thing we evolutionary biologists don't do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?" My response was, "In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him." Now that is good framing.

Mini-Movie Monday: Genesis Episode 2, Our Solar System (Synopsis)

“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” -Kalpana Chawla Two weeks ago, we released the first video in our web series: Genesis, the story of where all this comes from. The video was on Organic Molecules, and while it hasn't exactly gone viral (yet), the like/dislike ratio is pretty hard to beat. Well, it's time for Episode 2, on the topic of the Solar System. Head on over to Medium to watch the whole thing, along with an official transcript as well!

Asylum Street Spankers in Iraq

The Asylum Street Spankers are a very unusual band from Austin, Texas that I first heard of many years ago from my friend Gretchen. Another friend from Austin copied me a bunch of their stuff a few years ago and I really liked it. And now they're taking on the Iraq War and the pointless little shows of pseudo-patriotism that always accompany wars in this country. Click here to watch the video of "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV". And click here to see an inspired live performance of Hick Hop. And here's a classic clip called Winning the War on Drugs.

Cheery Friday Thought

Courtesy of EurekAlert: physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be "an island universe" made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void. You can always count on astrophysics to brighten your day. Or, if you'd prefer something actually amusing for your Friday blog-reading, you…

Extreme ice loss time-lapse video

I found this from a comment on a Skeptical Science article (worth a read in its own right) and thought readers here might be impressed. It is from a TED talk by James Balog who has been creating fascinating and awe inspiring time-lapse videos of calving glaciers. The whole talk is about 20 minutes and worth listening to, if you must you can jump ahead to around the 9th minute when the set-up ends and the visuals begin: Of course, the whole thing could have been cooked up by Phil Jones and CRU, with help from the NASA moon-landing fakers...

Five Thirty Eight Eviscerates the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday called "Funny Business in Minnesota" which is so full of inaccurate innuendo and fallacious factoids that when I read it I thought I was reading a piece of junk mail from Ann Coulter. Well, the honorable web site Five Thirty Eight has torn the WSJ a new one with a brutally accurate deconstruction of the editorial. There really is virtually nothing in this editorial that can be salvaged from the bright light of actual truth. Shame on the Wall Street Journal. Read the commentary from Five Thirty Eight here. Thanks Mike for the tip.

Space Tool Bag Visible from Earth!

Here is the film of the space tool bag floating away. Apparently, a veteran sattelite watcher ... this is a guy with a telescope who watches satellites from earth ... has filmed the bag from a different angle. From his back yard! ... Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario ... "It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces," he says. Spaceweather's satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag; Here's the video Click here…

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the intersection of science and religion

From "Lesser Known Wise and Prophetic Words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr." by liberal writer and California Democratic Party delegate, Deborah White: "Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral…

Poetry, of sorts

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. So begins James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work that makes Ulysses read like Dr Seuss. I just love that phrase, "from swerve of shore to bend of bay" ... reminds me of Dublin Bay. Famously, Finnegans Wake gave us Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark And sure any he has it's all beside the mark. a chorus "sung" by seagulls and from which the term 'quark' was taken by Murray Gell-Mann.

AAAS Photo Journal: Part I

Matthew and I chat with Alec Ross after the Clinton-Obama debate on Saturday. Ross represented Obama and Thomas Kalil represented Clinton. The AAAS annual meeting took place February 14-18 in Boston, Massachusetts. Scientists from around the world gathered to discuss ideas, explore emerging trends, and share exciting new research. Here I am with friends and SD08 steering committee members Matthew Chapman and Austin Dacey. More images from last weekend after the jump... The crowd watches on as Ross and Kalil discuss their candidates' positions on science policy. We don't learn much. More…

Best of the Brain from SciAm

I've just received a copy of Best of the Brain from Scientific American, courtesy of the publishers, Dana Press. Best of the Brain is fantastic a collection of essays from SciAm and SciAm Mind, by leading neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio and Eric Kandel, and top science writers like Carl Zimmer. The essays provide a fantastic summary of current thinking and research in a wide variety of areas, from addiction, mental illness and consciousness to brain-computer interfaces and neuromorphic microchips. The book will be published in the U. K.  on 20th August. The full contents, and…

Researchers resurrect 8 million-year-old bacteria

From the BBC: Microbes locked in Antarctic ice for as much as eight million years have been "resuscitated" in a laboratory. Researchers melted five samples of ice from the debris-covered glaciers of Antarctica which range in age from 100,000 years to eight million years. When given nutrients and warmth, the microbes resumed their activity - although younger microorganisms grew more successfully than the older ones. According to the news story, the paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but I couldn't find it at the time of writing…

Posting Problems Fixed

It looks like the good folks at Seed (thanks, Tim!) have fixed some of the posting problems that were plaguing ScienceBlogs over the weekend. This means that the system is no longer keeping me from, among other things, using the word "drugs" in my posts. Therefore, I'd encourage you to go back to the now fixed entry from Saturday on problems with the progress of HR 810. Since the site is no longer drug-free, make sure you visit the link to a story from Sex Drugs & DNA that I wasn't able to post before because of the problems.

CNI Fall Meeting

I gave a project briefing yesterday at the CNI fall meeting. I talked about our experience in building the Neurocommons project and the release of our RDF distribution for data integration in molecular biology. The meeting was PACKED. 400+ people. I was sad that my briefing was up against the OAI-ORE briefing - that's a project we want to connect to at a deep level - but I was glad to have a good crowd. It's a little intimidating to get questions from Don Lindberg about your use of bio-information from the National Library of Medicine, or from George Strawn about the NSF use of semantics.

I'm Blogging At Sea Baby!

Tomorrow, I will be blogging from sunny Monterey Bay. Actually, I will be blogging from foggy Monterey Bay but it will still be outrageous. You can tune in here at 7:00 am (Pacific Time) tomorrow for the first post. Hopefully, halfway through the day the antenna will be working and I will beam back to shore my second post. I will check back later tomorrow evening to answer in questions (posted in the comments). You can catch a live updated video from the deck of the ship and current position throughout the day. This is a test run for an even more amazing blog session coming in June!

Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin

A pant-hoot of appreciation goes out to United Kingdom bonobo, grimupnorth, for passing this along. Adam Kay is a junior doctor from the UK who passes his limited spare time by writing songs, including one about a new wonder-drug called Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin. He's built up a cult following, and he's currently selling out at the Edinburgh festival. There are some clips from the songs on this site: The Friday Project ("Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin" contained therein - Doc Bushwell) He gives all proceeds from his album sales to a cancer charity. See what you think. Adam Kay has a…

Words: Immune, virus

Taxes, national service, diplomacy. A far cry from immunology and virology. Unless you are a blogger or interested in words. Then you get to bring them together. First, taxes and national service. In Rome of old, these were things you owed to the Republic (as opposed to the Rome of today, the things you are expected to evade). The Latin word was munis, "sense of duty" (cf., "municipal"). Not everyone has a sense of duty (you noticed?). Even today -- imagine -- some people don't have to serve (they are given foreign policy roles in Republican administrations) or are exempt from paying their…

Immunity and cross-immunity to bird flu

A new paper has just appeared in PLoS Medicine on an old topic: whether seasonal influenza vaccines might also cause enough cross-reactivity to protect against H5N1. The basic idea is simple. The immune system "sees" the surface proteins on the flu virus and makes protective antibodies against them. The major stimulant for this is the hemagglutinin protein (HA), the H part of H5N1. There are 16 different immunological flavors of HA that cross-react very little. Since the human population has never had widespread infection with a flu virus that has the H5 subtype (we have had H1, H2 and H3…

More bad news about the global spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Last month, researchers from China reported in The Lancet Infectious Diseases that they had identified a gene (MCR-1) that confers antibiotic resistance to a last-resort antibiotic (colistin) and then found that gene in E. coli isolates from pigs, meat, and hospital patients. This prompted Danish researchers to re-examine the genomes of bacteria they had mapped previously, and they found the MCR-1 gene in sample from a patient who suffered a blood infection in 2015. They also found it in five food samples imported between 2012 and 2014. Mike the Mad Biologist found the plasmid and protein…

Chirality in Euhadra

Since Coturnix turned me on to this paper on snail chirality in PLoS (pdf), I had to sit down and learn something new this afternoon. Chirality is a fascinating aspect of bilaterian morphology. We have characteristic asymmetries—differences between the left and right sides of our bodies—that are prescribed by genetic factors. Snails are particularly interesting examples because snail shells have an obvious handedness, with either a left-(sinistral) or right-handed (dextral) twist, and that handedness derives from the arrangement of cell divisions very early in development. Sinistral (left)…

Right-Wing Political Correctness

Have you been following the goings-on at Wheaton College? Last week, Wheaton Provost Stanton Jones took the first step toward firing Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at the college for more than eight years, who posted on Facebook last month her intentions to show support for Muslims feeling besieged after the Paris terrorist attacks. “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” she posted on her Facebook page. “And as Pope Francis stated ... we worship the same God.” According to the private evangelical college, not…

Reactions to the Anti-Evolution Handraisers

In last night's Republican candidates debate, the topic of evolution was briefly mentioned. As I discussed here, McCain said plainly that he “believed in” evolution, but then quickly qualified his answer by adding that he also believed in God. Three other candidates (Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo) raised their hands when asked to affirm their lack of belief in evolution. IHere are some responses I've found around the web. I'll present them without comment. From Jonah Goldberg at National Review: I know there are Intelligent Design fans among our readers, but I found the string of…

Gut bacteria - fat or thin, family or friends, shared or unique

You are not alone. Even if you're currently reading this in complete isolation, you are still far from a singular individual. You're more of a colony - one human, together with microbes in their trillions. For every one of your own genes, your body is also host to thousands of bacterial ones. Some of the most important of these tenants - the microbiota - live in our gut. Their genes, collectively known as our microbiome, provide us with the ability to break down sources of food, like complex carbohydrates, that we would otherwise find completely indigestible. Peter Turnbaugh from the…

Blind Olympic athletes show the universal nature of pride and shame

Tune into the Olympic coverage over the next few weeks, and you will see many an athlete proudly raise their arms and head in victory, while a much larger number slump their shoulders and necks in defeat. We've all shown  the same body language ourselves, and a new study reveals why - they are innate and universal behaviours, performed by humans all over the world in response to success and failure. The discovery comes from Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia and David Matsumoto from San Francisco State University, who wanted to see how people across different cultures…

Was Bush right? Is switchgrass the solution to climate change?

We may never live it down. The sight of George W. Bush traipsing about his ranch in Texas, extolling the virtues of switchgrass-derived ethanol as a replacement for gasoline generated more than a few chuckles among scientifically literate environmentalists. Yet another example of the commander in chief's fanciful world view, right? Probably. But a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maybe, just maybe, he was on to something real. "Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass" by M.R. Schmer, et al. at the University of Nebraska…

Solar-powered green sea slug steals ability to photosynthesise from algae

Solar power is a relatively new development for humans but, of course, many living things have been exploiting the power of the sun for millions of years, through the process of photosynthesis. This ability is usually limited to plants, algae and bacteria, but one unique animal can do it too - the emerald green sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This remarkable creature steals the genes and photosynthetic factories of a type of algae that it eats (Vaucheria littorea), so that it can independently draw energy from the sun. Through genetic thievery, it has become a solar-powered animal and a…

Luskin's Latest Lie

If you love predictability, you've got to love the Discovery Institute. Whenever someone publishes a paper about human evolution, it's a pretty safe bet that someone there will soon take the time to explain how having learned something new means that we somehow know less than we did before. You can set your watch by it, almost. The latest example comes from Casey Luskin. He "discusses" a paper that came out in Nature this week that reported on some fossils from Dmanisi, Georgia. Several skulls have been described from this site already, and the current paper focuses on post-cranial (less…

Broad Institute to use Complete Genomics to sequence genomes of cancer patients

I discussed the second-generation sequencing company Complete Genomics a couple of weeks ago (see here and here). These guys are unique in that they offer their technology only as a service, rather than the usual business model of selling platforms to genomics facilities, and a highly restricted service at that: Complete has stated fairly categorically that it will only be sequencing human genomes (no plants, algae, or even chimpanzees!). Whether this business model will prove a commercial success remains to be seen, but the company seems to have impressed the genomics community with its…

An Unsettling Meeting with the UK's Science Minister

Last Friday the British Minister of Science, Paul Drayson, visited the science area of Oxford University to give a short speech and take questions. The audience was a fairly random assortment of a couple of hundred academics and students, mostly from the sciences. I was invited to fill one of ten graduate student slots granted to the Department of Biochemistry. It was a nice gesture by Drayson, and I think he was legitimately interested in hearing from scientists. Based on what I witnessed, though, I hope that he took some of it in. Drayson spoke and took questions about his role and the…

Curse my slow fingers! Someone else did the Kirk-car thing

Clearly, I am not a professional blogger. I am an amateur. This is because I was under the impression that only amateur bloggers could compete in the blogging olympics. When did they change these rules? Anyway, Adam Weiner did a physics-based analysis of the latest Star Trek movie trailer. Here is the trailer: In the trailer (oh, spoiler alert) a young Kirk jumps out of a car before it goes over a cliff. It does look odd, and that is why I had intended to analyze it. In Adam's analysis, at PopSci.com the basic approach was: Take the initial velocity of the car (from the clip) Assume…

My Fifteen Nanoseconds of Fame

While I'm away, I'm using the ScienceBlogs Blogerator 9000 to repost something from the old site. The NY Timesinterviewed me about an Australian Salmonella outbreak. From the archives: A few days ago, an article in the NY Times about multi-drug resistant Salmonella in fish tanks was published. I was mentioned. I'll have more to say about the subject shortly. (My moment in the sun is in italics). Nemo Beware: Fish Tank Can Be a Haven for Salmonella By DEBORAH FRANKLIN Tropical fish seem the tidiest of pets: they never lick your face, leap from the cat box to the kitchen…

Shadows of the past in genes

A new paper came out in Science this week, Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation, that's getting some media play. The second-to-last author is L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and the general combination of means and ends on display in The History and Geography of Human Genes, is all over it. From the introduction: We first studied genetic ancestry of each individual without using his/her population identity. This analysis considers each person's genome as having originated from K ancestral but unobserved populations whose contributions are described by K…

WHO: damaged goods

Declan Butler, senior correspondent at Nature, has a particularly infuriating news article today, infuriating because of the attitude it reveals from WHO, CDC and the Indonesian government about releasing information about influenza they alone are privy to. The main points of the article revealing more details of the genetic sequences of the large Indonesian cluster of eight related people in Karo, Sumatra in Indonesia have been known for at least a month, although never publicly released before Butler's article. Presumably he obtained the information from the same sources we and others did.…

Science Blogging Anthology - The Council Has Spoken!

I know you've all been waiting for this. Well, after two all-nighters, the deed is done. Under the fold is the final list of 50 posts that will be included in the anthology. There may be some small changes if some of the authors refuse (or never get back to me in the first place), but I have a couple of posts in reserve for such eventualities. This was a heck of a job (and I hope I did better than Brownie...) to do. All science bloggers are my friends, and all the submitted posts were excellent. Cutting down from 218 down to 50 was a heart-wrenching, blood-sweat-and-tears kind of a job (…

Global Warming as a Threat to Global Health - Review in Nature

Nature has a review this week on the Impact of regional climate change on human health(1) that is an interesting read. Contrary to the previous article we discussed which suggested what I think is a non-existent link between climate change and chronic disease, this article discusses the very real likelihood of increased acute mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular disease with extreme weather. Exposure to both extreme hot and cold weather is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, compared to an intermediate 'comfortable' temperature range15. Heat mortality follows a J-…

Memories of War, Part I (guest post by Mom)

Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade. It will appear here in five installments starting today and going throughout the week at the same time of day, so please come back every day and ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold: Rea Zivkovic Reiss was born in Sarajevo on November 23, 1932. Her father, architect…

Top notch job by OSHA staff to globally harmonize labels and datasheets for chemicals

While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from last year. This post was originally published on March 23, 2012. By Celeste Monforton Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard which align the agency’s 30 year old rule with a globally harmonized system for classifying and labeling chemical hazards. In “Moving from Right-to-Know to Right-to-Understand,” we learn how the changes stem from a 2002 United Nations resolution and why they should help U.S. workers better protect themselves from chemical hazards in…

The intricacies of sea ice formation

A common misconception about global warming is that it means warming everywhere on the globe. This is an understandable, if too literal, interpretation of the phrase for a non-scientist and is something that is often played upon by less intellectually honest participants in the debate. This is one reason why "climate change" and "climate disruption" are perhaps better descriptors, even if warming is what the global average temerature is and will do. Given the above, the fact that sea ice in the antarctic has increased slightly since careful mearsurements began (around 1%) is a frequent, if…

Lack of methane growth explained?

I've said before (and correctly sourced the original observation to JA) that atmospheric methane is way below its IPCC scenarios (which of course leads to a lower forcing). There is a recent thing in Nature that may explain this: Atmospheric methane (CH4) increased through much of the twentieth century, but this trend gradually weakened until a stable state was temporarily reached around the turn of the millennium1, 2, after which levels increased once more3. The reasons for the slowdown are incompletely understood, with past work identifying changes in fossil fuel, wetland and agricultural…

Climate Change News and Notes

This is what came across my desk this morning. A bit more activity than usual, but not by much. Enjoy. Or, rather, Be Afraid. Congressman Demands Obama Apologize To Oklahoma For Investing In Climate Change Research Just as extreme weather season kicks off, freshman Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) demanded that President Obama apologize to Oklahoma for allocating funding to climate change research. Bridenstine, a climate denier who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, plans to introduce a bill that defunds climate change research. Thousands more forced from home by…

Why Creationists Shouldn't Do Logic

Here's Uncommon Descent's Barry Arrington holding forth on on the bleak conclusions he believes follow logically from atheism: Make two assumptions: (1) That atheistic naturalism is true. (2) One can't infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions. At this point you might enjoy the exercise of determining what follows about morality from those two premises. I am happy to grant them both. From the first we conclude that supernatural entities, most notably God, do not exist. From the second we conclude that an understanding of…

Origins of the swine flu pandemic

In the time since the words "swine flu" first dominated the headlines, a group of scientists from three continents have been working to understand the origins of the new virus and to chart its evolutionary course. Today, they have published their timely results just as the World Health Organisation finally moved to phase six in its six-tier system, confirming what most of us already suspected - the world is facing the first global flu pandemic of the 21st century. The team, led by Gavin Smith at the University of Hong Kong, compared over 800 viral genomes representing a broad spectrum of…