Here's an cool page showing academic pedigrees of Drosophila workers: FlyTree.

 It's interesting to see how few steps it takes to get back as far as T. H. Morgan!  For example, here's where I fit in the grand scheme: Robert in FlyTree.

I can recall "O Superman" being something of a novelty hit in the UK charts.  I had heard it via John Peel's show, and always reckoned it was far more than merely a summer novelty hit.  One of my greatest regrets is that I did not go and see Laurie Anderson in Edinburgh on the eve of my final examinations for my degree.

Subsequently I bought a 5xLP recording of United States I-IV, from which her then stage show was abstracted, but that's no compenation!

The header images are all related to Drosophila:

Above: These are the giant polytene chromosomes found in a variety of tissues in Drosophila - these are from the salivary gland cells of the third instar larva.  Calvin Bridges (see picture of the fly lab below) devised maps based on the banding patterns of these chromosomes - maps still in use today.

This evening's event was the final event in the club's series of evening time trials.  A reduced turnout probably reflected the dodgy weather - it was quite breezy and rained quite heavily before we started. 

Despite turning up well before the start, I was the last to sign on, riding at number 15.  I didn't think it was a particularly quick evening, and as my computer was mostly on the blink I was riding without knowing my speed.  I took most of the corners pretty carefully, as they were a bit damp (particularly early on) due to drizzly rain, and got a bit stalled by a slow Landrover driver in Beachampton.  I felt like I was grovelling up the hill, but that's not unusual!  I had Kevin Stokes in my sights from the turn, and finally caught him at about Nash on the return leg.

Here are the current standings in the 2008 Beijing Olympics doping league.

Before the Games, Russia withdrew two walkers and a cyclist over positive test or suspicion of doping.   Bulgaria withdrew its entire weightlifting team due to positive tests for steroids.  The Greek weightlifting team also had numerous steroid positives.

The utilization during mitotic cell division of loci controlling meiotic recombination and disjunction in Drosophila melanogaster.

Bruce S. Baker, Adelaide T. C. Carpenter, and P. Ripoll 

Genetics 1978 90: 531-578. [Abstract] [PDF]

As a postdoc, I worked for several years on the cell cycle in Drosophila.  At that time, the field was just beginning to take off, not least because of the efforts of my then group leader.  Nowadays, I study the ageing process, still using Drosophila, and including modelling the function of WRN, the gene responsible for the progeroid condition Werner's syndrome (WS). WRN encodes a RecQ DNA helicase (unwinds the DNA double helix), but unusually has a second activity, a DNA exonuclease (removes nucleotide bases from the end of a DNA strand). We are currently studing the Drosophila homologue of the WRN exonuclease (which we have named DmWRNexo, and which is encoded by the CG7670 locus).

When trying to demonstrate that a mutant of CG76700 indeed displayed characteristic comparable with defects seen in cell lines derived from WS patients, I recalled reading this paper at the beginning of my postdoc position.

The Quackometer and Holfordwatch blogs report that the British Chiropractic Association, presumably fired by their New Zealand colleagues' attempts to silence scientific opinion, have filed a suit against Simon Singh following an article originally published in the Guardian (but now unavailable).  Hopefully this will engender a major Streisand effect, and I fully expect the case to fail.

See also the news report in the Telegraph (I notice the Telegraph journalists refer to the chiropractors as "Doctors" and doubt this is justified).

This year's Duo Normand time trial will be held on 21st September, and after a year's absence, Team Grumpy (a.k.a. Gerry Oram and me) will be competing again.  For a change, we are entered in the Corporate category instead of the Veteran category (we may revert to veteran if we continue to be the sole team in our category!).

The 20 riders who turned out for this event were fortunate that we managed to avoid the heavy showers (some extremely heavy) that plagued us during the day.  We did however suffer strong winds that made the opening leg to Chicheley something of a trial, and aero wheel handling quite twitchy at times.

I didn't hang around after the event, as it was getting darker and windy.  I also didn't see most of the guys for the pre-race banter as I was quite late getting up to Astwood - I assume Gilbert ("Hard man of the North") Wheelwright is still using the tribars and pointy hat!  Stuart Tarry's winning time of 22:55 was pretty quick for an evening like this (even if he claimed he only showed up because I was going to give him an entry for his '10' on 30th August- which I forgot anyway).

The Daily Telegraph reports an interview with Prince Charles, that famous organic farmer, where he continues to lambast genetically modified crops.

His criticisms seem to principally concern the mass commercialisation of farming - I guess his interests in organic community farming in Caithness and the Duchy estate prompt this.  However the interview seems to me to be interpreted by the media as a criticism of the GM industry, despite his comments being vague and really quite ill-informed scientifically. To say GM crops are a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong" is really unhelpful, with no evidence presented to support his stance.