Category: Misc.

Eisen Lab Paper.Li Magazine

Playing around with Paper.Li. Took feeds from the blogs and Twitter profiles of people in my lab. Seems to come out OK … http://widgets.paper.li/javascripts/sr.embeddable.js Paperli.PaperFrame.Show({ id: ‘6f0c6ad8-8b14-41e0-b46a-1a7592d3eadb’, width: 390, height: 480, background: ‘#ECECEC’, borderColor: ‘#DDDDDD’ })

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting 2012 Speaker Gender Ratio #LAMG12

Got some questions about the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes 2012 Meeting in regard to gender ratio of speakers and organizers, after I have been complaining about ratio at other meetings.  Here is the full list of speakers and organizers for this meeting.  Women in bold.
Organizers:
  1. Jeffrey H. Miller
  2. Jonathan Eisen
  3. Ashlee Earl
  4. Lisa Raleigh
So the organizers are a 50-50 split.
Speakers (in order)
  1. Jonathan Eisen
  2. Nina R. Salama
  3. Frederic Bushman
  4. Kristine Wylie
  5. Janet K. Jansson
  6. Forrest Rohwer
  7. Curtis Huttenhower
  8. Tanja Woyke
  9. Maomeng Tong
  10. Jeffrey Cox
  11. Susannah Tringe
  12. Julian Parkhill
  13. Rustem F. Ismagilov
  14. Gautam Dantas
  15. Pamela Yeh
  16. Mike Gilmore
  17. Lance B. Price
  18. James Meadow
  19. Jason E. Stajich
  20. Laura Sauder
  21. Tara Schwartz
  22. Susanna Remold
  23. Bernhard Palsson
  24. Anca Segall
  25. Trent Northern
  26. Rick Morgan
  27. Beth Shank
  28. Morgan Langille (added)
  29. Anthony Fodor (added)
  30. Peter Karp
  31. Tatiana Tatusova
  32. Timothy Harkins
  33. Katrine Whiteson
  34. Mallory Embree
  35. Varum Mazumdar
  36. Abigail McGuire
  37. Ee-Been Goh
  38. Shota Atsumi
  39. Howard Xu

So 37 39 speakers, 16 of which are women.  So that comes to 43.2 41%.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Storify for Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG12 Meeting

Meeting went well.  Here is a storification of it:

http://storify.com/phylogenomics/lake-arrowhead-microbial-genomes-2012-lamg12.js?template=slideshow[View the story “Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes 2012 #LAMG12” on Storify]

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Fun science art example: Jennifer Welsh on Zachary Copfer glowing microbe drawings

Microbiology art pops up again.  This time in this story from Jennifer Welsh: Galaxies And Faces Drawn With Glowing Bacteria – Business Insider .  For more see the artist Zachary Copfer’s website here: http://sciencetothepowerofart.com.  Other stories about Copfer are popping up too – not sure if their is some publicity blitz going on or not but see below for examples:

ut whatever is going on the art is worth checking out.
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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A must read for those interested in "Spin" of science by press releases & in papers

A new paper in PLoS Medicine is of great interest to me: PLOS Medicine: Misrepresentation of Randomized Controlled Trials in Press Releases and News Coverage: A Cohort Study.  Bad press releases drive me crazy.  And it has been shown that press releases can frequently be a source of scientific misinformation in the press.  Interestingly this paper concludes that spin in the papers themselves is correlated to spin in press releases … So in other words, the scientists are partly to blame … Not shocking but interesting …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Quick post: nice #openaccess review: Insights from Genomics into Bacterial Pathogen Populations

Just a quick post here.  There is a new review/commentary that may be of interest: PLOS Pathogens: Insights from Genomics into Bacterial Pathogen Populations.  By Daniel Wilson from the Wellcome Trust Centre at Oxford.

Full citation: Wilson DJ (2012) Insights from Genomics into Bacterial Pathogen Populations. PLoS Pathog 8(9): e1002874. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1002874

It is a nice and useful review …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Some quick comments on "Giant viruses coexisted w/ the cellular ancestors & represent a distinct supergroup"

Got asked on Twitter about this paper:

BMC Evolutionary Biology | Abstract | Giant viruses coexisted with the cellular ancestors and represent a distinct supergroup along with superkingdoms Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I answered briefly

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Don’t have time for a detailed blog post but here are some quick comments:

1. Giant viruses are fascinating and cool

2. I have done work connected to the topic of this paper and thus might not be considered fully objective.  For example see

3. I see no evidence that the type of analysis that they do on protein folds is a robust phylogenetic method.  Phylogeny from sequence alignments (which is what we focus on in my lab) have been tested and tweaked for some 50 years.  There are 100s to maybe 1000s of papers on methods alone – not to mention the 1000s of papers using alignments for phylogenetics.  I am not convinced that the analysis being done here of FFs and FSFs is particularly robust.  It seems interesting, certainly.  But is it sound?  I mean, I could build phylogenetic trees from cell size, from shape, from eye color, and from all sorts of other features.  Those would all suck for certain.  Protein folds – not sure about them.  They almost certainly are prone to convergent evolution and I do not see any attempt in this analysis to deal with that issue.
4. The authors of the current paper do not show any taxa names on their trees – just colors for large groups of taxa (bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and viruses).  It is really not good practice to remove the taxon names.  If they were there the first thing I would do is to look at the patterns within the groups they highlight.  Do all the major phyla / kingdoms of eukaryotes, for example, come out looking as one would expect based upon other studies.  Or are they all over the place?  Same for bacteria and archaea.  Not including taxa makes it nearly impossible to judge this paper positively.  I could not find this information in supplemental data either.
5. They really should have released the data tables they used for the phylogenetic analysis.  Don’t know why they did not.
6. In Figure 3 with the rooting they have, either viruses are a subgroup of archaea or archaea are not monophyletic.  Not a good thing in a paper trying to claim viruses represent a fourth grouping on the tree of life.
Anyway – got to do some other things but just wanted to get some comments out there.

UPDATE 9/19 – some prior stories about the “fourth domain” and ancient viruses – to counter notion in the press release for this paper that their findings “shake up the tree of life”.  Even if their specific inferences about viral evolution are correct, such inferences / conclusions have been made before.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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NASA personnel ignore planetary protection guidelines and risk putting microbes on Mars

Many years ago I served on a NASA sponsored committee for a series of meetings about the handling of samples collected from Mars.  One of the key points of discussion at those meetings was “planetary protection”.  The involved protecting Earth from possibly strange life forms that in theory could exist on Mars.  And it also involved protecting Mars from microbes and other life forms that could come from space ships/landers.  I even posted all the materials from these meetings a few weeks ago: Notes and materials from MARS Sample Handling Workshops 2000 ….

It is thus with great distress that I read an LA Times article that reveals that some of the people involved in launching Curiosity decided to ignore some of the planetary protection guidelines and made some hands on modifications that may have contaminated some of the drill bits on Curiosity with microbes from people.  See: If the Mars rover finds water, it could be H2 … uh oh! – latimes.com.

The LA Times reports that some NASA personnel opened a box of drill bits that had been sterilized and – in clean but not sterile conditions – installed one of these drill bits in a drill on Curiosity prior to launch.  Apparently they were worried that a rough landing could prevent the bits from being installable in the drill which would make the drill not be of any use.  And they appear to have now risked the sterility of the entire operation by doing this.  Well crap.  That just plain sucks.  So much effort by “planetary protection officers” and others.  That effort might all go down the drain because of this.  I get that some times things seem urgent and that sure – if the drill was useless people would be pretty upset too.  But this seems to me to be a serious error in judgement.

In a small way I helped develop the guidelines that were put in place to protect Mars from human induced contamination.  And now that seems to have been a wasted effort as the guidelines were ignored.  Not good.

Note – for those interested I have posted links below to the documents from my days at the NASA Mars Sample Handling Workshops.  Most/all are public domain materials but not all are easy to find so I thought I would post them here.  Note – I have done no clean up of scans – will do so at some point. Enjoy

UPDATE 9/13 – some more stories on this
UPDATE 2: 9/13 – UC Davis Prof. Dawn Sumner (who is involved with the Curiosity mission) disputes notion that opening the drill bit box is an issue

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Q-Bio conference in Hawaii, bring your surfboard & your Y chromosome b/c they don’t take a XX

Wow.  Just wow.  And not in a good way.  Just got an email invitation to a meeting.  The meeting is

“THE FIRST ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING: Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands. February 18-21, 2013.”  

Well, I mean – who wouldn’t want to go to Hawaii for a meeting.  And a meeting that 

“brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio.”  

Plus 

“Each year, the meeting will rotate on the Hawaiian Islands with a different thematic focus within q-bio.”

So I could go to Hawaii each year.  Cool.  And 

“The focus for the meeting this year will be Synthetic Biology, with about half of the invited speakers chosen as renowned experts in this area.”  

I like synthetic biology and, well, sometimes I like experts, so still good

But then, OMG, then, the confirmed speaker list and the conference organizers.

2013 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

  1. Jim Collins, Boston University
  2. Johan Elf, Uppsala University
  3. Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
  4. Timothy Elston, UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine
  5. James E. Ferrell, Stanford University 
  6. Martin Fussenegger, ETH Zurich
  7. Leon Glass, McGill University
  8. Terry Hwa, University of California, San Diego
  9. Roy Kishony, Harvard Medical School
  10. Galit Lahav, Harvard University
  11. Andre Levchenko, Johns Hopkins University
  12. Wendell Lim, University of California, San Francisco
  13. Andy Oates, The Max Planck Institute, Dresden
  14. Bernhard Palsson, University of California, San Diego
  15. Gurol Suel, UT Southwestern Medical Center
  16. Chao Tang, Peking University
  17. John Tyson, Virginia Tech
  18. Craig Venter, The J. Craig Venter Institute
  19. Chris Voigt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  20. Ned S. Wingreen, Princeton University  

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:

  1. Bill Ditto, University of Hawaii 
  2. Jeff Hasty, UC San Diego 
  3. Bill Hlavacek, University of New Mexico
  4. Alex Hoffmann, UC San Diego
  5. Brian Munsky, New Mexico Consortium 
  6. Lev Tsimring, UC San Diego 
That is a 25:1 ratio.  Pathetic.  Embarrassing.  The sponsors – UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences and BioCircuits Institute, San Diego Center for Systems Biology, the University of Hawaii and the Office of Naval Research – should all be ashamed.

For other posts on this topic see

UPDATE – I have now submitted an abstract to the meeting.  The abstract I submitted is available here and posted below

The probability of having one out of twenty six participants at a scientific meeting be female

A quantitative analysis of gender bias in quantitative biology meetings 
Jonathan A. Eisen
University of California, Davis
(Note – new title suggested by John Hogenesch)
Scientific conferences have key participants which I define to be the speakers and the organizers. Such key participants can be divided into two main classes based on gender: male and female, which I denote here as M and F, respectively (I realize there are other gender classes and I regretfully am not including them here). The number of key participants (which I denote as KP) for conferences varies significantly. For this analysis I focused on meetings with KP = 26. This value was selected for multiple reasons, including (a) that it is the number of letters in the English alphabet (b) that its factors include the number 13 which I like, and (3) because in email announcements for this meeting KP= 26. I sought to answer a relatively simple question – what is the probability that, for a meeting with KP=26, that F = 1. I chose this because this seemed extreme and because F=1 in the email announcements for this meeting. Using the probability mass distribution formula as below:
which becomes

n = NP = number of participants
k = f = the number that are female
p = percentage of f in population being sampled

I have calculated Pr (F=1) for KP = 26. Assuming for the moment that p = 0.5 (i.e., that the population to be sampled is 50:50 male vs female) then Pr (F=1) = 3.8743E-07. This is highly unlikely by chance alone. However the assumption of p = 0.5 is certainly off in some fields. I therefore calculated P (F=1) for different frequencies of F in the population (i.e., what is the expected ratio of females to sample from).

Thus for a meeting with NP = 26, only when the frequency of F is ~0.16 does P (F=1) exceed 0.05. So a question is then, what should we use for p for this meeting? An informal survey (John Hogenesch, posted to Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jonathaneisen/posts/10151208978630767?comment_id=24634832&offset=0&total_comments=15 ) suggests that in qBio the percentage is about 20%. However that may not be an ideal estimate since this meeting is specifically about synthetic biology, I do not have a any estimate of p for this field. However, examination of key meetings in the field (e.g., see http://syntheticbiology.org/Conferences.html for a list) reveals a percentage of perhaps a bit higher. For example at SB5 the ratio was about 35%. I conclude that it is likely that p > 20% in Synthetic Biology. Given that for p = 0.2 the Pr (F=1) < 0.05 I therefore conclude that the null hypothesis (that having one female out of 26 key participants) can be rejected – and that this meeting has a biased ratio of males: females.

UPDATE 2: Here is the full email I received, just for the record

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE 09/15/12http://w-qbio.org/abstracts.html

THE FIRST ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING
Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands
February 18-21, 2013http://w-qbio.org/

The Winter q-bio meeting brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio. Each year, the meeting will rotate on the Hawaiian Islands with a different thematic focus within q-bio. The focus for the meeting this year will be Synthetic Biology, with about half of the invited speakers chosen as renowned experts in this area.

SPONSORED BY:UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences and BioCircuits Institute
San Diego Center for Systems Biology
University of Hawaii
Office of Naval Research

2013 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Jim Collins, Boston University
Johan Elf, Uppsala University
Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
Timothy Elston, UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine
James E. Ferrell, Stanford University
Martin Fussenegger, ETH Zurich
Leon Glass, McGill University
Terry Hwa, University of California, San Diego
Roy Kishony, Harvard Medical School
Galit Lahav, Harvard University
Andre Levchenko, Johns Hopkins University
Wendell Lim, University of California, San Francisco
Andy Oates, The Max Planck Institute, Dresden
Bernhard Palsson, University of California, San Diego
Gurol Suel, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Chao Tang, Peking University
John Tyson, Virginia Tech
Craig Venter, The J. Craig Venter Institute
Chris Voigt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ned S. Wingreen, Princeton University

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:
Bill Ditto, University of Hawaii
Jeff Hasty, UC San Diego
Bill Hlavacek, University of New Mexico
Alex Hoffmann, UC San Diego
Brian Munsky, New Mexico Consortium
Lev Tsimring, UC San Diego

***REGISTRATION NOW OPEN***
Registration fee covers conference venue, opening reception, banquet, coffee & snacks.

EARLY BIRD ($450.00) REGISTRATION DEADLINE: December 1, 2012
REGULAR REGISTRATION ($550) DEADLINE: February 5, 2013

REGISTER NOW: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts.html

HOTEL: A block of rooms have been reserved for registered conference participants available for a negotiated rate of $199 per night at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. The rooms are available on first come first serve basis and will be available soon, so book early!

CONTRIBUTED TALKS: If you wish to present your work at the conference, either as an oral talk or a poster, you must submit an abstract through the conference website by the September 15th deadline. Abstract guidelines and submission information at:http://w-qbio.org/guidelines.pdf

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: September 15, 2012
Accepted abstracts will be announced October 31, 2012.

We encourage you to forward this message to any colleagues that may be interested in taking part in this exciting event.

Questions should be emailed to: coordinator@w-qbio.org

UPDATE 4:  (9/18/12)

Plus some links that may be of relevance

UPDATE 6: 9/23/12

Some more links on the recent PNAS paper on gender bias and evaluating scientists

UPDATE 7:  9/23/12

Interesting article on gender and invitations to write major reviews
UPDATE 8: More follow up to the Gender Bias study from PNAS 9/26

UPDATE 9: Other posts on gender bias of interest

UPDATE 10: 11/21/13

Just got this in my email.  Kudos to the people behind qBio for adding more women to their planning committee and adding a many women to the speaker list.
***ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2013***
http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

UPDATE:  In response to participant interest, the submission deadline has been extended to December 2, 2013.  This year 15 contributed talks will be selected from the submitted abstracts to be presented with the invited talks during the plenary sessions.  Contributed talks will also be selected for parallel breakout sessions which commence in the late afternoon.

THE SECOND ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING
Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands
February 17-20, 2014
http://w-qbio.org/

The Winter q-bio meeting brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio. The venue for 2014 is the Hilton Waikoloa Village, which is located on the Kohala Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. The resort lets you experience breathtaking tropical gardens, abundant wildlife, award-winning dining, world-class shopping, art and culture, and an array of activities. The Island of Hawaii is the youngest and biggest in the Hawaiian chain, providing a vast canvas of environments to discover–home of one of the world’s most active volcanoes (Kilauea), the most massive mountain in the world (Maunaloa), and the largest park in the state (Hawaii Volcanoes National Park).

SPONSORED BY:
UC San Diego BioCircuits Institute and the San Diego Center for Systems Biology
The University of Hawaii at Manoa
UC San Diego Divisions of Biological Sciences and Engineering
The Office of Naval Research

2014 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Naama Barkai, The Weizmann Institute of Science
Sangeeta Bhatia Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hana El-Samad, University of California, San Francisco
Zev Gartner, University of California, San Francisco
Taekjip Ha, University of Illinois
Shigeru Kondo, Osaka University
Arthur Lander, University of California, Irvine
Andrew Murray, Harvard University
Steve Quake, Stanford University
Petra Schwille, Max Planck Institute
Christina Smolke, Stanford University
Aleksandra Walczak, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:
Kevin Bennett, University of Hawaii at Manoa
William Ditto, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Hana El-Samad, University of California, San Francisco
Jeff Hasty, University of California, San Diego
Alexander Hoffmann, University of California, San Diego
Galit Lahav, Harvard University
Eva-Maria Schoetz-Collins, University of California, San Diego
Chao Tang, Peking University
Lev Tsimring, University of California, San Diego

***REGISTRATION NOW OPEN***
Registration fee covers conference venue, registration reception, banquet, coffee & snacks.

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ($500/$425 Student) DEADLINE: December 20, 2013
REGULAR REGISTRATION ($600/$525 Student) DEADLINE: January 31, 2014
LATE REGISTRATION ($675/$600 Student) After January 31, 2014

REGISTER NOW: http://w-qbio.org/

HOTEL:  A block of rooms has been reserved for registered conference participants at a negotiated rate of $199 per night at the Hilton Waikoloa Village. The rooms will be available soon on a first-come, first-served basis, so book early!

CONTRIBUTED TALKS:  If you wish to present your work at the conference, either as an oral talk or a poster, you must submit an abstract through the conference website by the November 5th deadline. Abstract guidelines and submission information at: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: EXTENDED UNTIL MONDAY, December 2, 2013 (Extended due to large volume of interest!)
Accepted abstracts will be announced by December 6, 2012.  You may submit your abstract now and if accepted, still register by the early bird registration deadline of December 20, 2013.
Abstract guidelines and submission information at: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

We encourage you to forward this message to any colleagues that may be interested in taking part in this exciting event.

Questions should be emailed to: coordinator@w-qbio.org

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Hmm .. apparently I am not supposed to be posting about #UCDavis in "social media" (SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM)

At the suggestion of a colleague I have been browsing through the UC Davis Policy and Procedure Manual – Chapter 310, Communications and Technology Section 40, University Communications: Publications, Graphic Standards, Marketing, and Media Relations.

Much of it is straightforward but much of it seems to basically be discouraging any direct social media posts or interaction with the press. See for example:

The News Service unit in University Communications is the exclusive source for developing and disseminating news about UC Davis to the general public via newspapers, radio, television, magazines, and the World Wide Web, including social media and related channels. The News Service unit determines the newsworthiness of significant developments and activities in academic research; administrative programs; accomplishments of faculty, staff, or students; events; and other campus matters. It conducts or coordinates direct contact with news media representatives, and assures that media relations are timely, accurate, comprehensive, and of broad public interest.

and

Generally, the news media will contact the News Service to find a source for a story. If a reporter contacts a source directly, that faculty member, staff member, or student shall notify the News Service

Hmm … so ..  when I was contacted by multiple reporters about the pepper spray incident and for my comments on it and on the handling of it by UC Davis I was supposed to notify the UC Davis News Service.  I suppose I could have done that.  But how about this – I communicate with dozens if not 100s of reporters on Twitter about all sorts of things.  Should I notify the news service about each contact?  That would actually be kind of fun.  They would block my emails very soon thereafter I am sure.
I am also wondering about the role of the News Service as the “exclusive source for developing and disseminating news” “via newspapers, radio, television, magazines, and the World Wide Web, including social media and related channels.”  So is this saying I am no longer supposed to write about UC Davis on social media?   No more blogging?  No more Twitter?  How does this jibe with all the retweets and reposts I get by official UC Davis groups/people?  
In the end I can imagine that the UC Davis administration would say this wording is not quite what they mean.  But it is there.  And technically, I am supposed to follow it.  Oh well, off to kill all my social media accounts.  Yeah, right.

UPDATE: Barry Shiller – UC Davis Communications Chief Guru has responded with clarifications that this policy is NOT intended to suppress any communications but is about coordination with the News Service

I’m replying directly and publicly as an expression of transparency, and professional respect for you.

You indeed misinterpret the policy. It was, and is, intended to optimize coordination with the media – not, as is inferred by your post, to inhibit anyone. Coordination, by the way, is as beneficial to the media as anyone. They appreciate knowing their go-to points of contact. That said, reporters contact faculty, staff and students without interference or inhibition. All the time. 

It may be that this policy fails to clarify or contemporize the distinction between “reporters” and social media content creators, including bloggers. If so, we will take a look at it; I’d welcome your input. 

But let me be clear: as you well know, many university constituents actively blog, tweet, post, opine. (I’m among them.) In this age, it is an important ingredient in telling our story. The policy is not intended to discourage that


——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–