I've been mean to computational/network/systems biologists recently (twice). Real soon here I'm going to get into some positive aspects of these fields, but before that, I have to slam systems biology one more time.

Guess which blurb was written within the last 5 years, and which one was written more than 30 years ago:

#1:

Want to drive  the politically correct segment of academia into a  tailspin?   Tell them there's a group of people hurting animals and watch the outrage.   Then tell them they are religious and watch it grow.   But then tell them they are a South American religion and it's part of their native heritage.  Hilarity ensues.
  
Candomblé is a religion practiced by the "povo de santo" (people of saint) primarily in South America.  They say it is inspired by older African beliefs.  It definitely makes much use of animal sacrifice.   It believes in the 'soul' of nature so anthropologists label it a form of Animism.   

Sometimes people are attracted to strange things. I still have trouble figuring out how people procreated in the 1970s and 80s - the hair, the moustaches, boys wearing those teeny short shorts - yuck. Apparently, butterflies are no different. Or so says a retired zoologist in a surprising PNAS article.

What do you do with a petabyte of data?

The question came up during a lunch today with two NASA computing people, on in IT and the other in supercomputing.  Modern satellites are returning petabytes of data, and there are many satellites.  This is far more than any human can expect to personally look at, and in fact more than they can fit into their local machine.  How do we make these huge amounts of data useful?

We can't ship it to the user's desktop-- there's no room, it'd take forever, and the user doesn't have tools that can browse massive data sets.

Is there an "Air Supply" in the bat world?  Not really, though they seem to have love songs, say  researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin

So let's look at the mysterious love sounds made by the winged creatures.

Women hedge and issue disclaimers and ask questions when they communicate, all traits that can suggest uncertainty and lack of confidence, but men do the same on gender-specific topics, according to new research from the University of California - Davis.

In his study, Nicholas Palomares, assistant professor of communication at UC Davis, asked nearly 300 UC Davis undergraduates, about half female and half male, to write e-mails explaining how to change a flat tire or buy make-up, among other gender-stereotyped and gender-neutral topics. Students were given the name and gender of the person they were e-mailing.

UC Santa Barbara scientists have revealed what they call a potential new drug delivery system - a biological mechanism for delivery of nanoparticles into tissue.

They developed a peptide, a small piece of protein that can carry "cargo" for delivery into the cell, whose cargo could be a nanoparticle, or even a cell.

Riding on the peptide, the cargo gets out of the blood vessel and penetrates the tissue.

The so-called SHOX gene (short stature homeobox gene) is responsible for the normal growth of bones and is often mutated in short-stature patients. Short stature is considered when final height of an individual is no more than 160 cm (men) or 150 cm (women).

Researchers in Heidelberg have now discovered that sequences of genetic material on the X and Y chromosome that regulate this gene are also crucial for growth in children.

Is music more than the sum of its parts?   We're going to find out if the right words and musical notes can lead to Frankenstein-ish success.

How can companies get the best possible performance out of their employees? Let them do whatever they want! And furthermore, don't offer incentives. Sound counter-intuitive? Not if you look at what research has shown regarding the economics of motivation.