When you think of systems biology, you don't ordinarily think of process verification and methodology.Sure, there has been data verification in biology and clinical trials in pharmaceuticals, but best methods and best practices don't really exist for systems biology.

And when you think of systems biology, you really don't think of Philip Morris, the cigarette folks.

It may be time to rethink both.

A Washington state referendum to put warning labels on genetically modified foods, I-522, failed in the last election, but a new effort is more clever - they want to warn the public about Frankenfish and are couching it in an effort to simply make the public aware if it's farm-raised or caught in the wild or, oh yeah, a TRANSGENIC ABOMINATION OF NATURE.

Loneliness is not a gnawing, chronic disease without redeeming features, social isolation is just a different scale of organization that can't be grasped outside evolutionary time and evolutionary forces. Well, maybe.

If you are alone this Valentine's Day, you are not...alone, you are part of a giant biological imperative, according to the psychologists behind an evolutionary theory of loneliness, who write in Cogntion  &  Emotion about its potential adaptive value on an evolutionary timescale.

Research and Development (R&D) has become something of a dirty word throughout a giant swath of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) community. Academia is where it's at, the saying goes, and basic research, learning for the sake of learning with no defined public benefit, is what scientists are told they must do if they want to be real scientists.

Technology will be fine, it is assumed. Like gifted students who find their school programs cut, the belief is that American technology will be find a way to be dominant. 

In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.

Evolutionary biology sounds exciting - there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok - but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in mid-sneeze before you get to create an epidemic or a giant monster.

Sneezing sponges? Isn't that a little far-fetched, even for the network that brought us "Arachnoquake"? No, actually the sponge thing is real, and a new paper points to Porifera sneezing as evidence for a sensory organ in one of the most basic multicellular organisms on Earth, even though it doesn't even have a nervous system to interpret sensory information.