Well, I have previously started an "Open Evolution" series here and now I am starting an "Open Metagenomics" series. I know, I have gotten grief from some out there (yes, you Rob Edwards - see comments here) about my support for somewhat non-open things in metagenomics, so I am going to try and make up for that as much as possible. In the first installment, I am pointing people to a new paper on PLoS Genetics "Trends in Selenium Utilization in Marine Microbial World Revealed through the Analysis of the Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Project" by Yan Zhang, Vadim N. Gladyshev (hat tip to Katie Pollard for pointing out this paper).

It's an urban legend we've all read - you meet some nice girl in Thailand and you black out and wake up in a bathtub without a kidney.

Kidneys, and other replaceable organs, have value because the wait list is long and someone has to die to donate them.

Arthur Matas, Professor of Surgery at the University of Minnesota, writing in this week's BMJ says a regulated system of compensation for living donors may be the solution to the growing shortage of kidneys for transplantation.

But Jeremy Chapman, from the Centre for Transplant and Renal Research in Sydney, argues that this could reduce the supply of all organs. He believes that the idea of the regulated market is a myth, which could have devastating consequences on the less easily regulated environments of Asia and Africa.

New evidence that chemical contaminants are finding their way into the deep-sea food web has been found in deep-sea squids and octopods, including the strange-looking "vampire squid". These species are food for deep-diving toothed whales and other predators.

In a study to be published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, Michael Vecchione of NOAA Fisheries' National Systematics Laboratory and colleagues Michael Unger, Ellen Harvey and George Vadas at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of The College of William and Mary report finding a variety of chemical contaminants in nine species of cephalopods, a class of organisms that includes octopods, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses.

Cephalopods are important to the diet of cetaceans, a class of marine mammals which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Cephalopods are the primary food for 28 species of odontocetes, the sub-order of cetaceans that have teeth and include beaked, sperm, killer and beluga whales and narwhals as well as dolphins and porpoises.

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) robs the brain of a protein that plays a major role in the way neurons communicate and that is essential for brain development, learning and memory.

A team of scientists has discovered new information about how FXS interferes with signaling between the nucleus of neurons and the synapse, the outer reaches of the neuron where two neurons communicate via chemical and electrical signals. The discovery should help lead the way to the development of new treatments for FXS, the most common form of inherited mental retardation and also a genetic contributor to some types of autism and epilepsy.

Translation of an organism's genetic information begins in the nucleus of a cell, where the DNA sequence (gene) is copied into an mRNA molecule, then exported into the cell's cytoplasm and translated into protein molecules.

LIVERPOOL, England, June 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- ATTN: Liverpool / North West Editors:

LONDON, June 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- Visual Matching Succeeds where Text-based Matching Fails

http://www.trace.com, an on-line, real-time registry of valuables for identifying the ownership and authenticity of valuable goods, announced today that it has identified a painting at a US museum that may have been looted during the Nazi era. The images appear identical despite very different text descriptions.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080613/AQF040 )

Trace.com experts estimate the value of the painting at over US$250,000. It was originally reported looted by the Belgian government.

BOSTON, June 13 /PRNewswire/ --

RISI, the leading information provider for the global forest products industry, today announced the launch of a new online service, PPI Markets & Prices. The new service combines content from four of RISI's industry newsletters (Pulp & Paper Week, PPI This Week, PPI Asia News and PPI Latin America News) and its Price Services into one streamlined source of pulp and paper market prices and news.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080521/NEW122LOGO )

Michael Shermer (the well known author and publisher of Skeptic magazine) and I usually see eye to eye on all things skeptical. On matters of economics, however, we seem to depart rather sharply. He is a former Randian (as in Ayn Rand) and current moderate libertarian. I am an unmitigated progressive liberal (yup, I like very progressive taxes -- that is, steep on the rich -- welfare, universal health care, free education -- including college -- and a tiny military).

During the summer my lab at Stony Brook University reads a couple of books for fun and intellectual enrichment. One of them this year is Shermer’s The Mind of the Market. I will take issue here with the arguments he deploys in chapter 3 in particular, entitled “Bottom-up capitalism.”

One of the central ideas of the book is to build a parallel between Darwin’s natural selection and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It isn’t that Shermer is trying to go back to so-called social Darwinism (which Darwin himself vehemently rejected), but rather to make the case that both biological systems and economies are “complex adaptive systems with emergent properties.” The conclusion to be drawn from this is that, just like natural selection yields results without the intervention of an intelligent designer, so we should let markets work their magic without government tampering (I simplify somewhat, you should read the book if you want the full treatment).

PLEASANTON, California, June 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- Test offers more reliable detection of Chlamydia trachomatis, the most commonly reported sexually transmitted disease in Europe.

An important component of early genetic material found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, say scientists from Europe and the USA. They say their research in Earth and Planetary Science Letters provides evidence that life’s raw materials came from sources beyond the Earth.

The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases. The team discovered the molecules in rock fragments of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969.

They tested the meteorite material to determine whether the molecules came from the solar system or were a result of contamination when the meteorite landed on Earth. The analysis shows that the nucleobases contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space. Materials formed on Earth consist of a lighter variety of carbon.