If you haven't heard of swine flu - Influenza A H1N1 - by now... well, you have unless you can't read, which means you aren't on this website.   Reading too many popular media articles may have led you to believe there's an epidemic on your doorstep.   Fortunately, it's just an epidemic of hysteria.  The number of reported swine flu cases (no deaths edit - okay, one death, still not worth a panic) in the US is 1/1000th of the regular flu deaths that occur each year.  Although a H1N1 vaccine is a few months off and would undoubtedly cure your hysteria, perhaps in the mean time learning more about thine swine flu enemy will lessen your inner fears of the microbial unknown.

Summer is coming. The time of camping and icy cold drinks. I've been working on developing a freeze dried beer that comes in a small pack and rehydrates fully carbonated with all its alcohol intact.

The march toward understanding the etiology of autism took a giant step foward today.

In a landmark genome-wide association study, published online today in Nature, researchers found that a variant on chromosome 5 was about 20 percent more common in autistic children.

Researchers examined DNA from more than 3,100 people in 780 families (with at least two autistic children), and then looked at an additional 1,200 individuals from families affected by autism, as well as nearly 6,500 healthy controls.

These are hard times for evil guys like me, who are always willing to speculate wildly on particle physics results -only to secretly chuckle at the ripples their extrapolations make, knowing for a fact that the Standard Model is as solid as it has ever been.

Suggestive new results which offer themselves as the first hint of a breakdown of the Standard Model are indeed quite rare nowadays. In a famous post which originated a $1000 bet (taken up in part by Prof. Gordon Watts and in part by Prof. Jacques Distler), no less than 32 months ago I was writing in my old blog:

We all know that we should eat our fruits and vegetables, but a new study suggests that they could also help prevent inflammation.  According to a study conducted by researchers from UC Davis in cooperation with National Center for Food Safety and Technology in Illinois and Penn State University investigated the effects of certain tomato products and found some interesting results.

Scientists have grown increasingly interested in properties of tomatoes, as they contain the compound lyocpene, a powerful antioxidant, as well as vitamins A, C, fiber, potassium and beta-carotene. All of these nutrients do a body good, but tomatoes may also help stave off chronic conditions, aided by increased inflammation.

DUBLIN, April 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Experts gather at medical meeting in Dublin to discuss more personalized treatment strategies

Emerging research presented today at a symposium during the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) shows that optimizing therapeutic nicotine products through new uses can significantly enhance efficacy while offering more ways of quitting. Global leaders in smoking cessation discussed clinical study and real-world results that highlight how these innovative treatment approaches go beyond the established and common uses of therapeutic nicotine to offer smokers encouraging new options in personalized quitting.(1)

NEWARK, New Jersey, April 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Offering Enables Organizations to Migrate To Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS Standard) From IBM Lotus Notes In As Little As One Weekend

Richard Dawkins doesn’t usually strike me as being naïve, but one has to wonder when Dawkins abandons himself to the following sort of writing about his favorite topic these days, the incompatibility between science and religion, on his web site:

DUBLIN, April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Shire plc (LSE: SHP, NASDAQ: SHPGY), the global specialty biopharmaceutical company, announces that at its Annual General Meeting today, all resolutions contained in the notice of meeting were duly passed and the results of the poll are as follows:

ATLANTA, April 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Enterprise Management Associates paper focuses on reducing costs with Stonebranch's Infitran and Indesca solutions.

Stonebranch(R), Inc. today announced that Enterprise Management Associates(R) (EMA) has published a white paper focusing on Stonebranch's Infitran(TM) and Indesca(TM) solutions entitled, Reducing Costs with Consolidated Job Scheduling and Intelligent File Transfer. A core challenge addressed in the paper is the need for alignment of IT services with business needs when confronted with infrastructure expansion outpacing budget expansion.

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