A bored biochemist-cum-blogger came up with a metabolic map entitled Metabolism of Evolution Information in the Blogosphere. The real metabolic map, by the way, is quite frightening. This is why I suspect undergraduate biochemistry has scarred me for life. (Just for starters, the Krebs cycle which is responsible for releasing energy from glucose is the innocuous-looking circle in the middle of that miasma. I bet there isn’t a biochemist out there who hadn’t studied the damn thing to death at some point.) « Pharyngula

Managed to snag a coComment account (search on Technorati for invite codes and try your luck) and will be installing the comment tracking code on this blog shortly.

South Korean state auditors allege that disgraced stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk had misappropriated research funds, being unable to account for $2.6m in grant money and having found to have accepted another $3.5m in unaccounted-for private donations. Looks like the shit is still hitting the fan here.

Dr. Free-Ride wrote an intriguing HOWTO for converting from chemistry to philosophy. My sympathetic heartstrings are tugging.

The White House has released its proposed 2007 budget. Knock yourself out, I’ll hold out for the outraged responses.

The Illinois men’s basketball team lost to unranked Penn State over the weekend, ending the NCAA’s longest home-game winning streak in history (so I’ve been told).

At a press conference on Feb 3, Cambridge astronomers announced they had successfully measured some properties of dark matter, that mysterious substance that permeates the universe and apparently does nothing other than add mass to galaxies. By measuring the trajectories of a lot of stars in a certain class of galaxies called local group dwarf spheroidal galaxies, they inferred the presence (and hence distribution) of dark matter. Interestingly, each galaxy appears to have the same amount of dark matter, which they claim represents the minimum amount of dark matter needed for a stable clump to hang together. This translates to a rather warm thermal distribution corresponding to a temperature of 10,000 K. Which is astounding, really, considering the thermal distribution of normal matter is a frigid 4 K. Read more from the Nature News release or the arXiv preprint, which appears to be in need of updating.

Some bloke called James recently proposed to some Ellie on the Ricky Gervais show (specifically, episode 10). Is this the first documented example of marriage proposal by podcast?