I have been conducting research using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster since I started my PhD in 1982.  In that time I have imported countless consignments of fly strains through the post and by courier (such as Federal Express).  On only  one occasion can I recall having difficulty getting them through customs - a box of female-sterile mutants from France got stuck, and was in a frightful state when they arrived (this was during my PhD).

The general practise is for the sender to affix one of those green customs tags, asserting that the contents are a gift, of no commercial value (typically $1 may be quoted), that they are live insects, but not an agruicultural pest or a vector of disease.  So for over 26 years as a practising Drosophila geneticist, I've had but one case where this has presented a problem.

It's all got rather Kafka-esque as I try to resolve the ongoing Drosophila importation crisis!  It transpires that the people who have decided that importation of Drosophila should be covered by legislation aimed quite properly at preventing the import of diseased farm animals are a subsidiary of Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) called Animal Health.

Now clearly these people have a vitally important job, particularly in light of recent outbreaks of bluetongue, foot and mouth and the potential threat of avian influenza (to which we can add the problems currently afflicting honey bees).  But nowhere on their website do I see indication of why they feel they need to hold up my harmless flies, which are not an agricultural pest, transmit no disease, are not harmful, and in any case would be unable to survive outdoors anyway.  To add to that list of characteristics, these are weak strains carrying recessive lethal mutations.  This is how they describe themselves and their responsibilities:

Over the weekend I've been playing around with Wordpress, having set up a blog over at wordpress.com, where you can set up a blog spectacularly quickly (as you can over with Google's blogger.com).  As a fairly experienced Joomla! user, I found the hosted blog slightly restrictive (for example I would have to pay a daily rate of $0.04 just to be able to edit the theme's css file).

I ended up doing a test installaion on my notebook, firstly using a dedicated database, then trying out incorporating its database within my main Joomla! database.  It turns out to be pretty straightforward to migrate content (though I imagine one would exceed the import limit quite quickly on an active blog).

The Chairperson of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council has announced an alternative therapy 'crackdown', according to the BBC news. How interesting:

It will not judge clinics on whether therapies are effective, but rather on whether they operate a professional and safe business.

The Windows Internet Explorer (Pre-Release Beta 2 Version 8) Privacy Statement makes for interesting reading.  Some excerpts follow (emphasis mine)

Suggested Sites

I reported the other day (BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company) that the BBC were using a cookie-based method to send off your browsing history at their website to a company based in the USA, Omniture.  It now turns out that several other companies are doing similar data transfer, though not using cookies.  Annoyingly, the list includes The Guardian.

In that thread, there are instructions on how to block transfer of this data: for Windows, and Linux.  Another contribution to that thread offers this crontab based approach for Linux, while there are observations for Vista users.  I think an approach for Macs will be forthcoming.

Via the excellent Pharyngula blog, I came across this ridiculous article by Bryan Appleyard in The Times:  For God's sake, have Charles Darwin's theories made any difference to our lives? - published on 11th January (so I got to it a little late - I'm more of a Guardian reader!).

Yes, Bryan, they have made a difference, and not the spurious negative ones you build up to in your article.  To be charitable, one must suppose the point of Appleyard's article is to point out that many (usually from the under-educated religious wing) do not accept evolution by natural selection (and I come back to the difference between comment and reportage later).

Picked this one up via Ben Goldacre's Bad Science miniblog, in turn linking to the Daily Mirror's site, where an article by some investigative journalists questions the efficacy of Ecoflow magnets.

It's a pretty straightforward debunking of the claims that these magnets when strapped onto fuel pipes improve fuel efficiency, cutting costs by 5-20%.  Similar devices, marketed as Bioflow are claimed to be benficial for arthritis sufferers.  Amusingly the company leaves any such claims to its network of distributors following a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority:

Now, another protest against the atheist bus, this time from a christian bus driver, who is taking exception to the phrase "There's probably no god...".

The bus company apparently will endeavour to ensure that Mr Heather won't have to drive one of these buses.  So, I suppose end of story.  Except of course, I spend much of my atheist existence being popped at by bizarre religious ramblings, not least via my morning radio listening, which is invariably polluted by "Thought for the Day".  If you are really keen to listen, you can do so here.

According to The Register (IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting), explanation of the loss of access to the internet archive to customers of some UK ISPs is due to an IWF blacklist, containing URLs contained within that archive.

The Register asked the IWF what URLs were blacklisted, who at the ISPs were responsible for implementing the blacklist, and why ISPs were blocking the whole archive, but the IWF refuse to comment on the URLs on the blacklist (it's their policy), and refused to (or were unable to) answer the other questions.