Got my poster printed today, and I must say that I'm very satisfied with the result! I'm now (almost) ready to go to Mexico... I just learned that I'll have to wake up at 5 in the morning to catch my plane! Hope I'll make it in time.

I noticed today that my PLoS RSS links were not updating for some reason; fixed them, and noticed tons of articles worth mentionning! You'll see the synopses appearing here in the next few days. I must say that PLoS is one of the most important initiatives in science right now, so let's encourage them.

Got my thunderbird email client (by the same people who code Firefox, the Mozilla foundation) on a USB key! So don't worry, I'll be able to update the site in the next three weeks. Hopefully I'll have time to relate my experience in Mexico; should be fun!

The only thing that saddens me is the total lack of discussion here. Thousands of unique visitors per day, and not a single comment? Don't be shy! We're here to talk about Biology, isn't it?

• Pain-free needles!
• 100 year old technology to fight MRSA
• Witness: 'Intelligent design' not science
• Bats a 'likely source' of Sars
• Nobel for stomach ulcer discovery
• Australians win Nobel for linking bug to ulcers

Editor : Read the original article on PLoS Biology, with pictures!

When chimpanzees were first seen using tools in Liberia in 1951, little was known about great ape behavior in the wild. The sighting was published as a short note by Harry Beatty in the Journal of Mammalogy (recounted by primatologist Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master).

Humans have cultivated potatoes for millennia, but there has been great controversy about the ubiquitous vegetable's origins. This week, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, a team led by a USDA potato taxonomist stationed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has for the first time demonstrated a single origin in southern Peru for the cultivated potato.

Australian researchers have found Envisat's MERIS sensor can detect coral bleaching down to ten metres deep. This means Envisat could potentially monitor impacted coral reefs worldwide on a twice-weekly basis.

An extensive EU-financed sleep research project is coordinated from FinlandIn spring 2005 a large European research and training network was establishedto investigate the causes and implications of poor sleep from the medical as well as from the social point of view. This EU-financed sleep research project, named"The biomedical and sociological effects of sleep restriction" will last for four yearsand is coordinated by Dr. Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen (Stenberg) MD, PhD, at theUniversity of Helsinki, Institute of Biomedicine.

Unscripted biochemical variations, or noise, leads to oscillations in gene regulation that couldn't otherwise be predicted

Geneticists have debated for decades the relative importance of nature versus nurture in determining how an animal looks and behaves, and now UCSD scientists report that noise could also be an important factor in determining phenotype.

Microarray technology could be used to tailor therapy according to the individual, and prevent breast cancer patients from having to undergo painful unsuccessful therapies. In a study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research, researchers analysed tumour tissue samples and identified a group of64 genes that can be used to predict a patient's response in the five years after adjuvant therapy for breast cancer. Identifying patients whose breast tumours express these genes could potentially be used to predict which patients would not benefit from adjuvant therapy, and avoid patients being given therapies with the potential of causing more harm than good.

The largest-ever experimental analysis of duplicated genes provides insight into mechanisms of evolution

When Mother Nature creates an identical copy of a gene in an organism's genome, the duplicated copy is usually deleted, inactivated, or otherwise rendered nonfunctional in order to prevent genetic redundancy and to preserve biological homeostasis. In some cases, however, gene duplicates are maintained in a functional state. Until now, the biological and evolutionary forces behind the maintenance of these duplicates as functional components of the genome have remained unclear.