Imagine we lived in a world where spontaneous mutations were caused by radiation and then released on an unsuspecting public without any testing.

Well, we do. It's called nature. 

High-energy cosmic rays have been breaking chromosomes into pieces that reattach randomly, and sometimes creating genes that didn't previously exist, for as long as some thing has eaten some other thing.

Last week I did an update on the anti-vaccine situation in America compared to 2012, when my book, Science Left Behind, was published. I noted that things have gotten better, primarily because people on the left have turned on those people on the left who make up the bulk of the anti-vaccine movement; primarily wealthy, progressive elites.

An interesting experiment published in Science placed baker's yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in separate identical bioworlds. Then, at the same time, historical contingency events would happen, just like they have on earth - and only the fittest survived.

Evolution tells us that there are things besides natural selection going on - there are mutations and genetic drift. If we boiled up some primordial soup today, a few billion years from now the planet would be a lot different due to that randomness.

Or not.

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, has a $29 billion per year budget, which dwarfs the National Science Foundation and NASA - combined.

You'd think for all that money they could have done a lot to create an Ebola vaccine before the crisis was all over the pages of The New York Times. But it seems they need just a little more. Dr. Collins says they have been working on a vaccine since 2001 but haven't been able to complete it because of a "10-year slide" in funding.

A recent genome-wide meta-analysis has identified a biological commonality among 120,000 regular coffee drinkers - 6 new genetic variants related to caffeine metabolism, lipid and glucose metabolism, and its psychoactive effects, found among about 2.5 million variants in the genome.