¡Viva La Evolución!

Hey!

Is anybody from the blogosphere going to Toronto to the ASM general meeting?

I’ll be presenting a poster there.

Send me an e-mail or something if you’re going and we can have a pint after the talks.

Viva la evolucion!

Tangled Bank 78 is up at About Archaeology.

After some requests from friends and some readers, and also cause I wanted a t-shirt with Carlitos Darwin on it, I have opened an on-line shop at cafepress

The prices you see are the minimum they allow me to charge (they get all the benefits) and I don’t get a penny out of it, but is fun.

So bring your geek out and get a t-shirt to show off the evolutionary within you.

Salu!

Tangled Bank is up at Aetiology!

I guess last march could have been called the microbial genomes month. PLoS dedicated most of last month’s issue to the goblal oceanic sampling that the Craig Venter’s institute is carrying out.
Also this week in Science there’s an article mentioning the ambitious program that the U.S. National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) has outlined: The Global Metagenomics.
I have the feeling that microbiology is getting more and more momentum. The next golden era of Micro is close!!

P.S: By the way, why don’t we have a bacterial genome day? you know, you have days for drivers, bees, unemployed, etc. I guess we deserve one, no? I propose the 28th of July, which was the day that the first bacterial genome was published (Haemophilus influenzae).

There’s a petition form to ensure public access to research that has federal funding

Sign up!

This week’s nature editorial includes a brief account on the situation of spanish research.

Although I fully agree with most of what is said in the article, I think that they don’t stress enough the uselessness of spanish bureacracy. Sluggish, incompetent, are so mild that to a spaniard like me they would sound like a compliment went used to describe the bureaucracy surrounding research in my country.

What they also don’t stress is the endogamy of the spanish departments, how many times have I heard “I would prefer to hire somebody I know”, “Yes these two guys have a good CV but they don’t know the department” as if a department was a maze or something like that.

Also many of the professors have been picked by hand during or right after the fascist regime in my country, and some have been sitting on their chairs for so long, with a lifetime tenure, that they forgot the word research if they ever knew it. Add to that the fact that most of the grants for PhD students are pathetic and that post-docs have a serious hard time to find their contracts renewed even though they might be doing first class research.

How many times have they said they are going to increase the budget? Just to remind you that they never mention that military research falls into the same category, with the only difference that those that benefit from it have power and weapons, and are likely to be retarded. Military research, NO t(h)anks! the difference is that the spanish scientific comunity is busy doing their jobs, unlike most military people. How many seriuos protests have we had regarding our situation? yes we’re always running a gel or having to feed the flies to move.

ZP before you increase the budget, dust the mites that dwell in some spanish departments cause they smell musky.
Strict anaerobiosis and endogamy does you no good if you’re a mammal.

By the way, try to find the CV of a spanish professor. You might get lucky.

This was written with the characteristic resentment of an angry emigrant. I wanna come back home someday!
Zapatero I you know you can help me!

I just read an article published in Nature by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese entitled “Biology’s next revolution”.

I think it’s understandable for those working with eukaryotic cells to have a bit of a “static” concept
of words such as genome and species even though these genomes and species have arised from exchange events and fluid interactions with their environment and cohabitants. It’s not acceptable for microbiologists to embrace this point of view which, as they clearly state in their article, is far from being true.

I think the way bacteria and archaea trade with their genomic legacies is more similar to the way indiviuduals develop our opinion in politics, religion, etc. When you define an organism as belonging to a certain species is the same as calling somebody republican, democrat, religious, etc. Knowledge and data is giving us a clearly blurred gradient between individual cells and their respective species.

I know it’s handy to put tags on things, that allows our brain to clearly recognise and allocate what we’re talking about, but, as this paper stresses is starting to be a bit a burden for scientific advance.

So I think we should keep our tags for our -80 C stocks but not to our way of thinking and comprehending the world that surrounds us; unless you want a frozen mind.

Hi everybody and welcome to the 70th edition of the Tangled Bank.

The first post from Science and Reason talks about the origins of life.

From Phil for Humanity we have a question and and anwser: How much is zero times infinite? Check the anwser there. Also at the same blog you can check another post about Global Warming.

Sperm competition is dealt wih at Behavioral Ecology Blog.

At Science Sketches we have a post about la creme de la creme on perfumes.

At Epigenetics News we have an overview of how good was 2006 for epigenetics.

The moving story of a single mother can be found at Discovering Biology in a Digital World.

An Archaeologist in a Labcoat , that´s what you´re gonna find at Aardvarchaeology.

At Balancing Life they talk about Lactose Tolerance.

Solar Radiation and Longevity is dealt with at Fightaging.

If you wanna know What is a scoter? check 10000 birds ( the blog!).

What are your predictions for 2007? You have two at Skeptic News.

That´s it lads and ladies. I´m spending christmas time at home in Cadiz (Spain), so now I´m gonna go and enjoy the sun and a coffee with a drop of milk while I finish my copy of The God Delusion of Richard Dawkins, tasty tasty.

Happy 2007 for you all and a lot of Salud y Libertad (Health and Freedom). This month I´m moving to a new house and I´ll have internet again (after 4 pathetic months of forced blogging detachment).

¡Viva la Evolución!

Just a brief reminder:

I´ll be hosting tangled bank tomorrow (Jan 3rd) posts are very welcome!