Followers of the huge Operacion Puerto blood doping scandal will remember the affair - Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes offered a blood doping service to professional sportsmen (and presumably sportswomen).  His services are most talked about in the context of professional cycling, but in fact his clients are reported to have included professional sportsmen from other sports.

The saga began with police raids in 2006, when Spain's Guardia Civil collected coded blood bags during its raid on the offices of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes.  (There is excellent coverage over at cyclingnews.com going back several years.) Fuentes' scheme was to withdraw blood from the cyclists, and store it for retransfusion, a process known as blood doping. This is a formerly legal technique (I believe it was used in the past by the US Olympic track cycling team( but it has been prohibited for many years now.  It's still clearly in use - witness the sorry tales of (for example) Vinokourov and Hamilton in recent years.

Over at his blog Heresy Corner, the Heresiarch has an excellent overview of the continual erosion of our civil liberties (Remember what he said about "British liberty"?).

The article is framed over a series of points made by Gordon Brown in a speech delivered shortly after he took office as Prime Minister.

The former chief of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has warned that the UK risks becoming a police state (The Daily Telegraph, "Spy chief: We risk a police state").  In the interview, she accuses ministers of interfering with people's privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.

This is a theme that I've returned to on numerous occasions over the last few months: that the UK Government has used (and, I believe, mainipulated) the terrorist "threat" to force through draconian measures that threaten out civil liberties and right to privacy.  From extended detention periods, to the increased databases held about (and following the Coroners bill, increasingly joined together), the general drift is to a situation where the state has uprecedented access to out communications and other aspects of out private life.Rimmington says

The Guardian reports today (UK mobile phone firms to sell data about customer activity) that mobile telecomms firms have been harvesting data about their customers web browsing habits, and that they plan to uses these data to increase advertising revenues.

The GSMA's chief marketing officer, Michael O'Hara, said: "We can see the top sites, see where people are browsing regularly. See the time that sites are being viewed, the number of visits, the duration of visits and we can also get demographic data so you can have age ranges, male/female ranges. 

The journal Current Biology invited a number of prominent biologists from a number of disciplines to re-read Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and to write commentaries - they can be found at (Re)Reading The Origin.

Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species is much referenced, especially in this double anniversary year. But, does anyone still read it? And, if so, what is the book itself like as a text? We have asked biologists from a range of fields evolutionary biologists, but also geneticists, ecologists, paleontologists and molecular biologists to re-read (or read) The Origin for Current Biology. Below are the responses, contributed by: Andrew Berry, Matthew Cobb, Simon Conway Morris, Jerry Coyne, Hopi Hoekstra, Peter Lawrence, Robert May, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Mark Ptashne, Matt Ridley and Marlene Zuk.

After a bit of teasing in the blogosphere that the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome would be released in time for Charles Darwin's birthday this week, I was eagerly looking for a paper.  Instead what I find are three news articles in Science, one describing some of the outcomes of the work, and two setting it in context. Some quotes:

Initial comparisons with our own 3 billion bases indicate that a mere 1000 to 2000 amino acid differences, as well as a yet-unknown number of non-coding changes, do that job. For comparison, about 50,000 amino acid differences separate us and chimpanzees. 

A bit of a rumpus about UK science funding policy erupted this week, following publication of a letter to the Times Higher about the move to increase the emphasis towards funding science with a more immediate benefit to the UK economy. This manifests itself as a two page document (the Impact Summary) that now forms part of every Research Council grant application (in addition, I think, to the short "Beneficiaries" section that already exists.

This policy seems to be favoured by the Science Minister, Paul Drayson.  Lord Drayson is a politician with a commercial science/engineering background, but who has never been elected to public office.  he was ennobled, and reaches Minister status via a seat in the House of Lords.  Interestingly, as befits a proponent of grant applicants predicting and outlining future benefits of their yet to be performed research (not just economic but social as well), he appears to claim sixth sense "I saw it coming, says minister of sixth sense Lord Drayson".

It's been a little while since I last blogged about the vile Phorm system, in which all internet activity that is undertaken by customers of ISPs using the system is inspected and analysed for key words via which targeted adverts may be delivered.  For more information about this system, check out the excellent Dephormation.  We've seen a variety of "spinning" techniques used by both Phorm (former spyware distributors) and their principal client, BT, over the last few years, and news over the last couple of days has been typical.

Back in 2006 and 2007, BT conducted secret tests of the system, using their customers as guinea pigs, without their knowledge or consent.  This was probably illegal, and certainly an unreasonable act.  A third trial (in which users were invited to participated) was held at the end of 2008.

While wandering round the internet during the recent flare-up of bloggers writing about recent developments in the MMR-autism conspiracy theory, I came across this neat graphic which seems to me to encapsulate some of the issues relation to causation vs coincidence (for example, see "MMR and false syllogisms" for more information).

In the meantime, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog seems down - maybe the recent upsurge in traffic has overwhelmed it.

I am sat on the train, reading my emails using the Vodafone USB mobile broadband stick, when I get this: