One of the key points that perpetually surfaces in the Intelligent Design debate is comparing animate with inanimate objects and attempting to draw comparisons or conclusions¹.  This becomes more pronounced when we begin to consider the role of less tangible elements, like intelligence, and begin considering how such a thing would manifest in a machine.  In effect, it's the problem of determining what life is and how does it differ from everything else.

Often we look at complex machinery and associate meanings or parallels to biological systems, however this is an incorrect perspective.  No matter how sophisticated the machine is, it is invariably only a tool and as such needs to be examined from that viewpoint.

Now we get to corn.  It seems that everything having to do with generating chemical energy, like methane and alcohol, making plastics is lumped under the moniker “biomass.” 

The fun with biomass is to follow the money.  Take biodiesel.  We just grow soybeans, rapeseed, sunflowers – whatever you want to make oil out of, press them and run diesel engines with it.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on Tinkering Makes a Comeback Amid Crisis. They are talking about what is referred to by varied terms such as Do-It-Yourself (DIY), the Make movement, and simply Crafting.  The concept is 'build cool stuff, like machines and lasers and robots."

Mice who had the PKCI/HINT1 gene removed had an anti-depressant-like and anxiolytic-like effect, say esearchers writing in BMC Neuroscience who applied a battery of behavioral tests to the PKCI/HINT1 knockout animals, concluding that the deleted gene may have an important role in mood regulation. Elisabeth Barbier and Jia Bei Wang, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland, USA, carried out the experiments to investigate the role of the gene in regulating mood function. Wang, the corresponding author of the paper, said, "The knockout mice displayed behaviors indicative of changes in mood function, such as increased perseverance and reduced anxiety in open spaces".

As a mouse vet, my job is to suggest refinements to make cancer studies as easy as possible on the mice. 

Today I got access to a collection of very cool pictures of the CMS detector, one of the two experiments designed and built to study proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Many of those pictures, which were taken by Michael Hoch (CERN/CMS) in the last couple of years, have circulated in the web for a long time, and individual ones have been used in several places. However, they are very nice to browse one after the other. And I think they are even more interesting to watch if one has not had the privilege of visiting the giant detector in its underground cavern, during its assembly last year. So I take the liberty of showing them to you here, in case you missed them - or just like to refresh your memory on this technological marvel.

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), recently accepted a six-figure grant from the Coca-Cola Corporation to "educate consumers about the role their products can play in a healthy, active lifestyle," and nutrition experts from Harvard University are not very happy about the new partnership.

Contrary to conservative wisdom, exercising up to the end of pregnancy has no harmful effect on the health of the mother or child, and may even be beneficial for both, indicates a study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

160 healthy women between the ages of 25 and 35 took part in the study, all of whom had sedentary habits and no risk of premature birth. Of this group of women, half followed an exercise regime under the supervision of experts in Physical Activity and Sports Science in collaboration with the Gynaecology and Obstetrics Unit of Hospital Severo Ochoa in Madrid.