There's a class war brewing and it involves DNA.

Only the wealthy can afford what is, now, around $350,000 for the kind of sequencing that can tell you if you have a disease-risk gene that can be passed on to kids. That's a Bentley.

Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland - "I’d rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane."

I like to keep tracking of interesting ways people find us and I saw a Google link for us with the keywords The world's greatest scientist. And what does it link to? Yep, yours truly. That Google is worth every penny of its gazillion dollar capitalization with results like that.

Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle fame is calling it a day - sort of - by ending her own column and starting a new one with another person. Good writer, good scientist, good community advocate. So go by and take a read at the new one once they're up and running.

I just noticed there is a new Gene Genie out, hosted by Sciencebase and I am linking to it because Sciencebase does good stuff and this is not the sort of 'same old people' self-promotion we tend to see in these carnivals.  

It's also coincidental because this just came up in an email with Berci yesterday.   If anyone thinks this is something we should host (and I wrote that to Berci also) go ahead and get it going.

It needs one person to collate all the articles but we like that kind of community thing and we can provide a substantial audience outside the blogging community.  

The Maya are having a tough 2008. First, the mystery of the cool blue pigment they used in pottery was solved and then we found out that all kinds of Mayans were building temples to do those enlightened sacrifices they did. Everyone's been throwing out theories about the downfall of the Maya; hurricanes, overpopulation, disease, warfare, peasant revolt or (insert your favorite disaster here).

When you saw 'bio-based lubricants' you thought it was just a way to appeal to that girl wearing a Greenpeace shirt at the bar around 2AM, right? Not so, perv. Aside from being non-petroleum based, bio lubricants are good. Maybe too good, as this article cum PR piece for WISE Solutions notes. Namely, they can cause machines to over-perform. But that's a good problem to have. Sure, the article coos a little too affectionately about these lubricants to be on the level but the idea merits some consideration. I like the bio-based idea but it hasn't worked well so far.