This interesting paper investigates whether there is a relationship between polyandry and selfish genetic elements, in the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura. 

Polyandry - where females have multiple mating partners - is widespread in animals, but despite its frequency, little is known of the costs and benefits of this reproductive strategy (though this paper cites evidence that the costs of multiple mating appear to outweigh the benefits.  It is likely that the benefits lie in that polyandry gives the female a greater degree of control over paternity, via sperm competition.  There is also a possibility that selfish genetic elements may promote polyandry by correlating male fitness with sperm competition.

The BBC has this report on an interesting marine biology discovery, relevant to explaining trace fossils.  Unfortunately it's a bit vague (exemplified by its title - 'Grape' is key to fossil puzzle), and doesn't have a link to the original research paper in Current Biology. Personally, I think it looks less like a grape and more like a truffle.  The picture to the left shows a cleaned up example - the real things roll around the sea floor covered in mud.

Greg Laden's Blog - Giant Gromia (amoebas) may account for ancient sea floor tracks presents a rather more coherent account of the paper, and includes a citation.  Unfortunately my university doesn't have an online subscription to Current Biology.  Rats! Rats!

The latest publication from our project investigating a Drosophila homologue of WRN exonuclease is now online.  

Ivan Boubriak, Penelope A. Mason, David J. Clancy, Joel Dockray, Robert D. C. Saunders, Lynne S. Cox (2008). DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease Biogerontology DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3

This is my third posting on my upgrade experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' (see Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' upgrades and Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' update.  In the second of those postings, I reported that an attempt to project from my laptop borked all my nice Compiz desktop effects. 

This morning I made one last ditch attempt to resolve this before reinstalling 8.10 - and succeeded. This was in part due to advice in this thread at ubuntuforums.org.

BT's major PR blunder of deleting all reference to the vile Phorm/Webwise system from its broadband support fora continues to whizz through the internet as the Streisand effect builds.

The Register weighs in - "BT silences customers over Phorm":

The Register reports that Wacky Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is pushing ahead with plans to implement one of the biggest (if not the biggest) intrusions into the privacy of the UK population.

This batty "anti-terrorism" measure seeks to monitor all communications, including telephone, mobile phone, internet and email.  The claim is that content of communications will not be recorded, merely the details of who is communicating with whom.  But don't forget the tendency of function creep.

New Humanist magazine has published some amusing "cut out and keep" trading cards (God Trumps), each focussing on religions (oh, and atheists and agnostics).  I particularly like the Scientologist card, especially as I am just re-reading Russell Miller's excellent 1987 biography of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.  I also rather like the agnostic card!

Well, it turns out BT have decided to censor their broadband fora and remove all traces of discussion about the vile Phorm/webwise system by which they planned to spy on all their customers' internet habits.  Their somewhat pathetic announcement can be read here.

There have been several threads to which all messages concerning Phorm/Webwise have been consigned.  Messages elsewhere concerning Phorm/Webwise get edited to remove such references. 

Well, of the three machines upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 that I blogged about the other week, I've been mostly using the Sony Vaio notebook.  Some issues have come to light (some good, some bad):

The new Network Manager (see the previous post for getting it to work) is brilliant, it's so easy to switch between wireless networks, and between wired, wireless and 3G networking.  It's a joy after previous versions.  So, definitely a huge improvement over 8.04.