] WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 — All nine members of an expert panel
] established by Congress to advise NASA on safety resigned today,
] with several citing frustration over a lack of influence.

Whoa!

All 9 Members of a NASA Safety Panel Resign

] To gather new strains, Sulakvelidze need only drop a
] bucket into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The waters of the
] Chesapeake Bay, of which the harbor is an inlet, have
] enough exchange with the Atlantic that he can find a
] phage for almost any species of bacteria, he says. If one
] doesn't work, he simply refills his bucket and looks for
] another that does.
]
] "This upgradability is one of the unique qualities of
] phages," Sulakvelidze adds. "Developing a new antibiotic
] takes 10 years and God knows how many millions of
] dollars."
]
] As he puts it, "Mother Nature runs the best genetic
] engineering lab out there. No institution or company can
] match it."

I'd like to know just how effective existing phage remedies are. I really should have brought a bunch of this stuff back with me from Moscow.

Wired 11.10: How Ravenous Soviet Viruses Will Save the World

Synthetic biology refers to both (a) the design and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world and (b) the re-design and fabrication of existing biological systems.

[*drool*....I have found my new calling.....Synthetic Biology...its an emerging field, and I am so excited to learn more about it!!!! - Nano]

Synthetic Biology

Introduction to Bioperl (www.bioperl.org). This course introduces to the bioperl modules with examples and exercises.

A cool course to learn the bioperl collection of libraries.

Bioperl course

Excellent documentation, FAQ and tutorial for the bioperl libraries.

Perl modules documentation for bioperl-live

Bioperl is a collection of perl modules that facilitate the development of perl scripts for bioinformatics applications. As such, it does not include ready to use programs in the sense that many commercial packages and free web-based interfaces do (e.g. Entrez, SRS). On the other hand, bioperl does provide reusable perl modules that facilitate writing perl scripts for sequence manipulation, accessing of databases using a range of data formats and execution and parsing of the results of various molecular biology programs including Blast, clustalw, TCoffee, genscan, ESTscan and HMMER. Consequently, bioperl enables developing scripts that can analyze large quantities of sequence data in ways that are typically difficult or impossible with web based systems.

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It is good to know the bioinformatics.

BioPerl FAQ

] A cheap way to produce human proteins for therapeutic use
] may finally be possible thanks to a genetically modified
] yeast. The "humanised" yeast should lead to greater
] availability of treatments relying on, for example,
] antibodies and human growth hormone, as well as new
] treatments.

Cool :)

Now when does this translate into me getting cheap human growth hormone and IGF-I?

New Scientist - Modified yeast produces fully human proteins

] Scientists have been boggled by the 40-foot-long mass of
] gray, gelatinous flesh that was first spotted over a week
] ago near Puerto Montt, about 600 miles south of the
] capital, Santiago.
]
] Whale conservationists went to see it last Sunday,
] thinking it was a beached whale, but quickly concluded it
] was an invertebrate, appealing to international experts
] for help.

Whale, giant octopus, squid, or something new?

Reuters: Unidentified Sea Creature Washes up in Chile

Delicate threads of spider's silk are about to solve a major problem in photonics: how to make hollow optical fibres narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits.

To make the fibres, Yushan Yan and a team of engineers from the University of California at Riverside give the silk thread a glassy coating, and then extract the silk by baking. They soon expect to be able to make hollow fibres with cores just two nanometres wide - or 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

New Scientist | New Technology

] In a study to be published in the journal Biology of
] Reproduction, researchers collected samples from the
] underarms of men who refrained from using deodorant for
] four weeks. The extracts were then blended and applied to
] the upper lips of 18 women, aged 25 to 45.
]
] The women rated their moods on a fixed scale for a period
] of six hours. The findings suggested something in the
] perspiration brightened their moods and helped them feel
] less tense. Blood analyses also showed a rise in levels
] of the reproductive luteinizing hormone that typically
] surge before ovulation.

I just KNEW those women at the gym that looked at me like, "Is that big guy doing sprints on the treadmill gonna have a heart attack?", were actually thinking, "Lets copulate."

Study: Male sweat brightens women's moods