The US National Academy of Sciences just issued one of its matchless Big Fat Reports, this one on intellectual property rights, patents, and patenting related to genomics and proteomics. Don't nod off; the report came to a couple of intriguing conclusions that are likely to have a big impact on the life sciences.

One surprise is this: the conventional wisdom that US patenting has interfered with or somehow... Click to continue

The Saturday afternoon lecture at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, DC, by the Dalai Lama had been widely anticipated, and had sparked a petition of protest organized by mainly Chinese-origin researchers. In the end, however, there was just one protester standing silently outside the press conference room, holding up a conference tote bag with the words ?Dalai Lama NOT qualify to speak here? inscribed in barely... Click to continue

A recent item [subscription required] in Nature made me feel happy as well as healthy... For a while I've been telling some selected people about the wonders of probiotics on my health... I've always wondered though if I'm being duped or if there is some form of placebo effect at play. Now there seems to be some evidence and I feel far less of a "snake-oil-salesman-by-proxy".... Click to continue

One more organism has taken a giant leap and gone into space, the humble lichen (really more than one species, as we all know that lichens are composites of algae and fungi). The European Space agency removed the lichens from the comfort of their rock dwelling and blasted them off on a Soyuz rocket where they were subjected to the cold vacuum of space for just under 15 days. Their tough mineral coating seemingly protecting them from the whole spectrum of UV radiation and cosmic rays.

The two... Click to continue

Yesterday marked the end of testimony for Kitzmiller vs. the Dover area school board, a six week trial in which parents had sued the a school board for trying to introduce intelligent design into science class. The York Daily Record, a local paper, covered the events admirably, and if you?ve been reading, this last week proved quite exciting.

That is, of course, if you believe newspapers. ID defenders in this case tend not to.... Click to continue

I found two cool new tools today. The first, via Sourceforge, is PuMA, a standalone Java front-end to PubMed. PuMA (currently at version 1.0alpha) allows you to view bibliographic search results and abstracts in the same window, visually construct complex Boolean queries, and export data to EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite, and BibTex. It also offers keyword... Click to continue