Dunbal is right - the adaptive immune system is basically the same in all vertebrates. So dogs will have a small number of directly inherited pathogen recognition receptors (e.g. TLRs) and a much larger (by several orders of magnitude) library of randomly generated ones in the form of antibodies or B- or T-cell receptors. Having a big population with the same MHC types could create a small shared vulnerability to the spread of disease, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Thanks to the adaptive immune system, a monoculture of cloned vertebrates isn't comparable to a monoculture of e.g. plants.

I can vouch for Spotify's windows client working perfectly under WINE for me and a few friends. We're all on various versions of (k)ubuntu with whatever version of WINE is currently latest in the stable repos. The Mac client is great too.

Very good points. I think I've been using a very sloppy definition of gene, just a vague idea that it's only DNA>RNA>protein>action or DNA>RNA>action. I've never really got deeply into thinking about regulatory elements, etc. It's compounded by the fact that, while I'm interested in cancer, most of my actual work is with a DNA-based virus that only produces a very few non-translated RNAs that we're aware of. I have a tough time convincing some people that even those are biologically relevant.

I sometimes think that RNAs and various epigenetic factors (I'm including DNA secondary and tertiary structures here) fall into the same trap as a lot of post-translational protein modifications: They're hard to study so not much is written or understood about them, so most non-specialists basically ignore them and decide they can't be too important. It's changing now as techniques evolve to do the experiments, but I'm still shocked how often I see someone basically say "well we don't understand this so we'll assume it's not affecting our system".

Cancer has been with us throughout recorded history. Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese doctors described and drew tumours growing on their patients covering a span of about 2000-4000 years ago. There's also archeological evidence of cancers much older than that, e.g. in Bronze age fossils.

Cancer has become more common over the last hundred years or so. A huge part of that is simply the fact that we're living much longer, meaning that the odds of a given person developing cancer are much higher.

Of course you're right that environmental factors are important. Smoking and increased alcohol consumption are probably the biggest contributors, probably followed by poorly tested or controlled industrial synthetics like Asbestos. I've no idea what makes you think that no-one is researching this stuff. It's not exactly hard to find: cancer.org and cancerresearch.org.uk are great places to start reading about the known risk factors in modern life. Or, you know, there's google.

Probably the best source about risk factors is this huge meta-analysis of cancer papers. A science journalist's summary: In addition to the cancer risk associated with excess body fat, the WCRF-AICR study offered 10 lifestyle recommendations to help ward off cancer, including limiting red meat consumption and excessive drinking, exercising daily, avoiding processed meats such as bacon and ham, and eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The research synthesizes many individual reports that have found similar lifestyle-cancer connections for specific cancers.

But even with cancers caused by environmental factors, there's still good reason to sequence genomes. Cancer develops as a result of a cell's DNA becoming damaged in ways that constitutively activate its replication programmes and suppress its checkpoint and suicide programmes. So sequencing the genome of cancer cells gives a lot of information about exactly how those cells became cancerous (although we're not sure what we're looking for yet), which in turn suggests ways to treat that specific cancer. Alternatively, sequencing healthy cells from people can give us information about why some populations are at higher risk of developing cancer. For example, carriers of specific forms of the BRCA1, BRCA2 or BRIP1 gene are at higher risk of developing breast cancer than the rest of the population. These discoveries gave us insight into how this cancer develops, which hints at possible treatments. Also, if someone has their genome sequenced and discovers these faulty genes they can take steps to avoid other risk factors (alcohol, etc) to control their risk, and attend more regular screening than the general population.

Data handling and analysis is becoming a big problem for biologists generally. Techniques like microarray (or exon array) analysis can tell you how strongly a set of genes (tens of thousands, with hundreds of thousands of splice variants) are being expressed under given conditions. But actually handling this data is a nightmare, especially as a lot of biologists ended up there because they love science but aren't great at maths. Given a list of thousands of genes, teasing out the statistically significantly different genes from the noise is only the first step. Then you have to decide what's biologically important (e.g. what's the prime mover and what's just a side-effect), and then you have a list of genes which might have known functions but more likely have just a name or even a tag like "hypothetical ORF #3261", for genes that are predicted by analysis of the genome but have never been proved to actually be expressed. After this, there's the further complication that these techniques only tell you what's going on at the DNA or RNA level. The vast majority of genes only have effects when translated into protein and, perhaps, further modified, meaning that you cant's be sure that the levels you're detecting by the sequencing (DNA level) or expression analysis chips (RNA level) actually reflects what's going on in the cell.

One of the big problems studying expression patterns in cancer specifically is the paucity of samples. The genetic differences between individuals (and tissues within individuals) means there's a lot of noise underlying the "signal" of the putative cancer signatures. This is especially true because there are usually several genetic pathways that a given tissue can take to becoming cancerous: you might only need mutations in a small subset of a long list of genes, which is difficult to spot by sheer data mining. While cancer is very common, each type of cancer is much less so; therefore the paucity of available samples of a given cancer type in a given stage makes reaching statistical significance very difficult. There are some huge projects underway at the moment to collate all cancer labs' samples for meta-analysis, dramatically increasing the statistical power of the studies. A good example of this is the Pancreas Expression Database, which some pacreatic cancer researchers are getting very excited about.

"lepassword"?

That's a really good point.

However, I wonder what would take longer: a search for [6-10 characters including a number and mixed case] or a simple dictionary attack? (This isn't rhetorical, I have no idea what the answer is; anyone feel like calculating it?)

My gut feeling is that imposing those limitations is probably useful when you're dealing with non-techies (who'd otherwise probably just use a word), but that you're right when dealing with users who can be trusted to come up with their own strong password.

It's a facet of human nature that people tend to assume that others think and behave broadly the same way they do. Like the techs in the recent Gnome 3.0 posts arguing that everyone intuitively understands what icons, links, files and folders mean on a computer (tell that to my dad, who just barely knows how to click the "internet" icon and browse simple websites), or political activists who assume that their oppositions must see the world the same way they do, so they're just lying. Heck, there's the whole "internet community" who read a pile of overlapping sites (/., techcrunch, digg, boingboing, etc) and assume that the rest of the internet does too, so that a survey of those sites (legalise cannabis, allow torrents, etc) represents the views and priorities of everyone else. They forget e.g. the big rings of craft websites whose members have probably never heard of 4chan and digg, much less read them, not to mention the many more people who simply don't go on social websites beyond facebook.

It's just the echo chamber effect. A teenager knows that this is how he and his friends use technology, so he assumes it's true for everyone else. So the report might be an interesting insight into how he thinks, but totally useless for anyone who wants an actual profile of his age group.

No, that use of "advise" doesn't make sense in British or Aussie English. Brits and Aussies agree with North Americans that "advise" is a verb, "advice" is a noun. It's just a typo. Skimming that text, nothing leaps out at me as being specific to British or US English.

Copying isn't theft! At worst, it's copyright infringement. If the original city of Lancaster wants to profit from its name it should be touring the world, engaging with its fans and charging money for gigs. You're clearly just a shill for the CIAA (Cartographic Industry Association of Angles and saxons)

For folks who can't access Pandora, have a look at Spotify. It's a similar idea to Pandora, but gives you more control over which tracks you listen to. I don't like it's "artist radio" as much as I like Pandora's stations/channels, but building playlists more than makes up for it. It runs in a client rather than a browser; works perfectly for me on Mac (10.4) and Kubuntu 8.10 (running inside WINE).

The one con relative to Pandora is that Spotify has audio ads; I've never counted but it's something like one 10 second ad every 10 songs. Not perfect, but much better than listening to a real radio station. On the upside, you can pay for a day or a month of ad-free listening.

There's also Magnatune which is a good source of DRM-free independant music. Not great as a radio station, as the free streaming is very basic, but I've got some good music from them.

Yes. You can divide a yard (36 inches) by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 or 12 and get a low integer answer, usually one that's easy to sub-divide. Sure it's hard to divide by ten, but in a mostly base-12 system you shouldn't need to much. On "human" scales that you're likely to use for e.g. a DIY project, it can make the maths much easier to handle.

That's a big part of why our clocks are based around the numbers 12 and 60: A 60 minute hour is easily divided into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, tenths or twelfths and still give you an integer number.

I'm one of the generation of Brits who were taught exclusively in metric units, and always think in them except for speed when driving (I'm a lab scientist, so I always think about liquid volumes in metric, even in pubs). I barely understand Imperial, especially weights (16 oz/lb, 14lb/stone, 112lb in a cwt, WTF?) and have no clue how many yards are in a mile, but I can see that non-decimal units make certain calculations much easier. Imperial units are a nightmare for science but, for the vast majority of people, that doesn't matter.

Who with? I'm currently looking to switch away from Virgin, because they're terrible (massively oversubscribed, resulting in dialup-like speed at peak times) in my area.

Wait, CO2 is a fundamental particle now? I told you those guys at CERN would mess something up!

The amount of carbon in the world may be constant, as might the amount of oxygen. But making new CO2 is a trivial task (baking soda + vinegar, glucose + oxygen, etc etc); destroying it is slightly easier but plants seem to manage it quite well. If current research on synthetic photosynthesis goes well, hopefully we'll be able to make machines do it efficiently soon too. [1], [2]

"So what are we doing so wrong in our schools that completely and utterly destroys this passion for learning?"
Allowing the kids to hit puberty. I know, I'm appalled too.