The conference in Halifax last week is reported on the Sandwalk blog.

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I have been at a Tree of Life meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia this week.  It is funded (indeed, my travel and accomodation and food is funded by The Leverhulme Trust). Larry Moran is blogging about the meeting on the SandWalk blog.

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I have been doing radio interviews today about the flu pandemic.  Essentially the message is that while there have been about 30,000 cases of this pandemic strain causing an infection, there have been fewer than 0.5% deaths.
Now, while this is a terrible situation for the families of the bereaved, it is only slightly above the […]

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Today the Sun newspaper reported an interview with me and it was slightly out of context.
I said that this pandemic strain of flu could kill millions…but we don’t know enough yet.
The flu kills about 500,000 people every year, usually old people or people with other medical problems.
The 1918 Spanish flu did indeed kill about 50 […]

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So, with a bit of a smile on my face, I read about more ranting from a DUP assembly member.  The following is from the Guardian.  Please try not to laugh.  The DUP need not to be mocked too much these days.

The Ulster Museum in Belfast faces a legal challenge unless it stages a creationist […]

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There is an article in Silicon Republic today about the emergence of bioinformatics in Ireland.  I said a few wacky things during the interview and they made it into the article.  Recently there has been an attempt to bring back an extinct species, the Pyrenean Ibex, by nuclear transfer (cloning) and a baby ibex was […]

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Many people credit Darwin with being the very first person in the history of the world to suggest that all the creatures on the planet never changed.  In fact, it was common currency among scientists and thinkers that organisms evolved and indeed that the planet had evolved.  Michelangelo, Plato and Socrates all had thoughts on […]

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A substantial portion of the Tasmanian tiger genome was sequenced and published today.  Interesting beast.  It was a marsupial and therefore, much more closely related to the Kangaroo and the Oppossum than to any actual tiger.  It was a predator that was top of the food chain in Tasmania and it went extinct because of […]

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Well, I’m back in Snowmass Colorado at Rocky08 - the satellite meeting of the ISMB.  I’m speaking in about 2 hours.Some really good talks so far.  Jack Horner gave a talk yesterday where he did some analysis of the VIOXX data.  VIOXX was withdrawn from the market in 2004 amid concerns that it was causing […]

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This news has stunned me in a way that has surprised me.  I have had lots of dealings with London Zoo.  I have spoken there at evolutionary biology meetings and been for a few beers in the zoo club and it is all very positive and above all scientific.
Today, I find out that Cincinnati zoo, […]

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