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.

It's long been known that cows fed antibiotics to ward off diseases can be placing them back into the environment biologically - and that could be one reason for increased antibiotic resistance.

We can't be too hard on cows and chickens, people are doing the same thing, and in far greater quantities. We use a lot of antibiotics.

Food containers in the House became more environmentally friendly last week - again - as paper containers have started to take the place of their stryofoam counterparts.

We've seen this all before, of course. In my introduction to Science Left Behind I noted that the last time Democrats had the House locked down their big green move was replacing plastic utensils with corn-based alternatives that broke easily and melted in soup. And the containers had to be shipped on emissions-belching trucks to deep Virginia where they could be composted, all for far higher cost.