The phrase 'like herding cats' resonates with people for a reason; it's difficult to get them to do anything they don't already want to do.

But they have no problem getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in Current Biology, which shows that even biologists are concerned about future feline-human relations.

It seems crafty felines accelerate the filling of food dishes by sending a mixed signal: an urgent meowing coupled with an otherwise pleasant purr.  Humans find it annoying and difficult to ignore.   It's not April 1st or December so calibrate your belief accordingly. 

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley say they have demonstrated a way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost, flexible materials; optically active semiconductors in arrays of nanoscale pillars, each a single crystal, with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter. 

Want to live forever but starving is not for you?   A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may be more to your liking.

Sulfate gets all the attention but iron and manganese compounds may be important role in converting methane to carbon dioxide and eventually carbonates in the Earth's oceans, according to a team of researchers looking at anaerobic sediments.

Those same compounds may also have been key to methane reduction in the early, oxygenless days of the planet's atmosphere.  On the early Earth, where oxygen was absent from the atmosphere, sulfates were scarce.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and Tessera Solar recently unveiled four newly designed solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF).

Sandia’s concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) team has been working closely with SES over the past five years to improve the system design and operation.

I’ve been prompted to write this because of the misconceptions about the concept of the “Selfish Gene” in Evolutionary theory – evident in both blog replies on this site and more widely.

I get really irritated when I see writers in the social sciences characterise evolutionary biology as somehow being based on the same assumptions as rational choice theory. Here is the first paragraph from a book chapter I saw today which motivated me to start this blog and write this entry...

A new public document has been made available on the CMS public web page yesterday morning. It reports on a study of the reach of the CMS detector, with data collectable in 2010, for a signal of large extra dimensions, using the very distinctive signature of a high-energy jet recoiling against -well, recoiling against nothing; or better, something which left our world and entered into another dimension of space.

In light of the popularity of this piece, here are some things to keep in mind about 'selfish' genes:

1. The basic issue is about the unit of selection - does natural selection choose allele, individuals, populations, or species? The answer, like most things in biology, is yes, as Douglas Futuyma puts it in his standard textbook on evolution (p. 354. 3rd edition):

If, then, our concept of levels of selection includes causality, natural selection can act at the level of the gene (as in meiotic drive), organism, and at least in principle, population and species.

STUTTGART, Germany, July 10 --

- Celesio CEO Dr Fritz Oesterle: No Pharmacy Chain Planned in Brazil

The supervisory board of Celesio AG has today approved the majority holding of
50.1 per cent in pharmaceutical wholesaler Panpharma. This step into one of the
most attractive and strongest-growing pharmaceutical markets world-wide is part
of Celesio’s growth strategy. Celesio doesn’t plan to setup a
pharmacy chain in Brazil.