An interesting experiment published in Science placed baker's yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in separate identical bioworlds. Then, at the same time, historical contingency events would happen, just like they have on earth - and only the fittest survived.

Evolution tells us that there are things besides natural selection going on - there are mutations and genetic drift. If we boiled up some primordial soup today, a few billion years from now the planet would be a lot different due to that randomness.

Or not.

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, has a $29 billion per year budget, which dwarfs the National Science Foundation and NASA - combined.

You'd think for all that money they could have done a lot to create an Ebola vaccine before the crisis was all over the pages of The New York Times. But it seems they need just a little more. Dr. Collins says they have been working on a vaccine since 2001 but haven't been able to complete it because of a "10-year slide" in funding.

A recent genome-wide meta-analysis has identified a biological commonality among 120,000 regular coffee drinkers - 6 new genetic variants related to caffeine metabolism, lipid and glucose metabolism, and its psychoactive effects, found among about 2.5 million variants in the genome.

Some people are so obsessed with their food it smacks of zealotry. They might eat only a certain kind of fish cooked on a certain piece of wood. 

They might even believe that they can taste the difference between a strawberry processed at an organic farm and one processed at a conventional one. 

When it becomes truly bizarre, it affects family and friends. Writing at Genetic Literacy Project I discuss people who are on an obsessive quest for health perfection, to an extent that they fetishize their food process.