An international team of researchers has determined key structural features of the largest known virus -the mimivirus, called by some a possible "missing link" between viruses and living cells. It was discovered accidentally by French scientists in 1992 but wasn't confirmed to be a virus until 2003.  The findings may help determine whether the unusual virus causes any human diseases.

The virus infects amoebas, but it is thought to possibly be a human pathogen because antibodies to the virus have been discovered in pneumonia patients. However, many details about the virus remain unknown, said Michael Rossmann, Purdue University's Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences.

Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter.

Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to test if these effects were specific for facial recognition or if they help us to identify other objects as well.

"The Lost World", published in 1912, is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work but his account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago has lasted into modern times in a way Sherlock Holmes has not - at least until the new Robert Downey movie comes out with him in the starring role.

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.

Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus  circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.   A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.

In a previous article, I discussed the controversies associated with anthropological research and debunked myths regarding the true intentions of molecular anthropologists.  Furthermore, I also provided examples of Native American communities willing to work with researchers in order to reconstruct their ancestral heritage.   Native Americans, for the most part, are rational and scientists, for the most part, are respectful.

Graduate education in the humanities may have its problems, but don't try to tar science with the same brush. In a NY Times Op-Ed, by Dr. Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia's religion department, we're told that graduate education in general is in need of a major overhaul.

Graduate programs train students for jobs that most of them won't get:

The art of haiku poetry originated in Japan, with roots stretching back to the ninth-century or earlier. According to the US Census of 2000, people of pure Japanese descent make up 16.7% of the population of Hawaii. Residents of Hawaii annually consume nearly seven million cans of SPAM, or about six cans per capita.

If you do the math, it leads you inevitably to the work of Keola Beamer, the Hawaiian slack-key guitar player and leading advocate of SPAM haiku, who graciously contributed the following, deeply moving verses:

Silent, former pig
One communal awareness
Myriad pink bricks   

Twist, pull the sharp lid
Jerks and cuts me deeply but
Spam, aaah, my poultice

In mud you frolicked

Houston, Texas, hometown of both Roger Clemens and Walter Cronkite (and, errr, David Khoresh if we're being comprehensive) is a bellweather city for the US, says a researcher who happens to live in Houston - in that it is now more Democrats than Republicans and minorities are the majority.    According to the data, if this trend continues and it's really indicative of a nationwide trend as claimed, Houston (and therefore all of America) could be hispanic gay men by 2030.

Filligent, a Hong Kong-based biotech company, is mobilizing stocks of its anti-infective BioMask to help combat the global spread of the deadly new Mexican strain of Influenza A.   The BioMask is the first medical face mask to kill the Influenza A virus within seconds of contact while retaining the breathability required by front-line workers and children, who are often the first to fall in a contagious episode.

If pizza isn't already on the list of 7 greatest inventions of the post-modern world (because nothing goes with wanting to strangle someone who invokes Foucault like a nice slice of pepperoni) a new discovery may put it there; the physics of the perfect pizza toss have inspired Monash University to design the next generation of micro motors  ... thinner that a human hair.