This recent paper caught my eye, as as some of my recent research has related to the regulation of antimicrobial defence in Drosophila.  Insects have a two ways of coping with microbial infection.  Firstly, microbes may be dealt with by circulating blood cells (haemocytes) of which there are several classes.  Haemocytes to no play any role in respiration in insects.  A second means of controlling microbes involves several peptides that kill bacteria or fungi:  these are usually expressed in response to the presence of microbes in the haemolymph.  Interestingly, this induced system has a counterpart in vertebrates.  It's generally thought that the important system in clearing pathogenic microbes in insects is the induced antimicrobial peptides.  This paper investigates the roles of both systems.

The authors have evaluated the relative use of these two mechanisms of infection control in Tenebrio molitorI, the mealworm (picture above).  Their hypothesis is that the haemocytes represent the first line of defence, with the induced response of antimicrobial peptides mopping up microbes remaining from the first round defence.  In this model, the induced antimicrobial response largely functions to eliminate suviving pathogens that may be refractory to the first line of defence.

Here's a brief update on the BT Total Censorship and the general BT-Webwise situation - for more background, see part 1 and part 2, and follow this thread at the nodpi.org forum. 

PC World - UK Prosecutors Investigate BT Over Online Ad System PC World magazine pick up on stories that the Crown Prosecution Service is now investigating illegal interception conducted by BT in 2006 and 2007.

Section 41 blog - Two Conferences Raise Concerns over Phorm  Reports from two recent conferences on internet privacy, in which BT's activity came in for comment.

There's an interesting news article in Science, entitled Last Stand for the Body Snatcher of the Himalayas?, concerning a fungus with quite unusual habits.  The full citation can be found at the end of this article.

Cordyceps sinensis is a pretty strange fungus - it infects ghost moth caterpillars, and in doing so alters their behaviour such that when they hibernate for the winter, they orient themselves on end and near to the surface.  Over the winter, the fungus consumes the caterpillar and eventually pushes a fruiting body above ground.  In the picture below, you can see remnants of the caterpillar, from which the brown 'mushroom' protrudes (picture from wikipedia).

A group of contributors to the nodpi.org website braved the vile elements in Manchester to hand out leaflets outside the "Privacy by Design" meeting, to highlight issues surrounding the vile Phorm and BT's implementation BT Webwise.  Here is their report.

So, what's the point of having scientific advisors if you plain ignore what they tell you?  A group of scientists have written to The Guardian urging the House of Lords to look at scientific evidence and hold off from reclassifying cannabis from C to B.  (Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog has featured media misrepresentation of cannabis)

The Register reports that the Home Secretary ignored her advisors, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and proposes re-classifying the drug.

This interesting paper investigates whether there is a relationship between polyandry and selfish genetic elements, in the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura. 

Polyandry - where females have multiple mating partners - is widespread in animals, but despite its frequency, little is known of the costs and benefits of this reproductive strategy (though this paper cites evidence that the costs of multiple mating appear to outweigh the benefits.  It is likely that the benefits lie in that polyandry gives the female a greater degree of control over paternity, via sperm competition.  There is also a possibility that selfish genetic elements may promote polyandry by correlating male fitness with sperm competition.

The BBC has this report on an interesting marine biology discovery, relevant to explaining trace fossils.  Unfortunately it's a bit vague (exemplified by its title - 'Grape' is key to fossil puzzle), and doesn't have a link to the original research paper in Current Biology. Personally, I think it looks less like a grape and more like a truffle.  The picture to the left shows a cleaned up example - the real things roll around the sea floor covered in mud.

Greg Laden's Blog - Giant Gromia (amoebas) may account for ancient sea floor tracks presents a rather more coherent account of the paper, and includes a citation.  Unfortunately my university doesn't have an online subscription to Current Biology.  Rats! Rats!

The latest publication from our project investigating a Drosophila homologue of WRN exonuclease is now online.  

Ivan Boubriak, Penelope A. Mason, David J. Clancy, Joel Dockray, Robert D. C. Saunders, Lynne S. Cox (2008). DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease Biogerontology DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3

This is my third posting on my upgrade experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' (see Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' upgrades and Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' update.  In the second of those postings, I reported that an attempt to project from my laptop borked all my nice Compiz desktop effects. 

This morning I made one last ditch attempt to resolve this before reinstalling 8.10 - and succeeded. This was in part due to advice in this thread at ubuntuforums.org.

BT's major PR blunder of deleting all reference to the vile Phorm/Webwise system from its broadband support fora continues to whizz through the internet as the Streisand effect builds.

The Register weighs in - "BT silences customers over Phorm":

The Register reports that Wacky Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is pushing ahead with plans to implement one of the biggest (if not the biggest) intrusions into the privacy of the UK population.

This batty "anti-terrorism" measure seeks to monitor all communications, including telephone, mobile phone, internet and email.  The claim is that content of communications will not be recorded, merely the details of who is communicating with whom.  But don't forget the tendency of function creep.

New Humanist magazine has published some amusing "cut out and keep" trading cards (God Trumps), each focussing on religions (oh, and atheists and agnostics).  I particularly like the Scientologist card, especially as I am just re-reading Russell Miller's excellent 1987 biography of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.  I also rather like the agnostic card!

Well, it turns out BT have decided to censor their broadband fora and remove all traces of discussion about the vile Phorm/webwise system by which they planned to spy on all their customers' internet habits.  Their somewhat pathetic announcement can be read here.

There have been several threads to which all messages concerning Phorm/Webwise have been consigned.  Messages elsewhere concerning Phorm/Webwise get edited to remove such references. 

Well, of the three machines upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 that I blogged about the other week, I've been mostly using the Sony Vaio notebook.  Some issues have come to light (some good, some bad):

The new Network Manager (see the previous post for getting it to work) is brilliant, it's so easy to switch between wireless networks, and between wired, wireless and 3G networking.  It's a joy after previous versions.  So, definitely a huge improvement over 8.04.

More details of the European OLPC G1G1 offer now released. Seems as though transactions will be in sterling, and via amazon.co.uk.

For  full details of the OLPC laptop, and the background to its development, see the official page.

Well, it seems I was premature in my triumph at escaping the clutches of BT as my broadband provider.  Having switched from BT to Zen on the 10th October, I was surprised to see a credit card charge coming through from BT Openworld dated 14th October.

I rummaged about on the BT web pages for an appropriate phone number, and found it spectacularly byzantine.  Or possibly labyrinthine.

BBC News has a story that the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) will be available in Europe on a Give 1 Get 1 basis via Amazon.

I've written about the OLPC project before - this is the project started by Nicholas Negroponte to develop a low-cost laptop for educational purposes, aiming to produce the devices for $100.  Last I heard, they'd got the cost down to $189. The OPLC runs Sugar  Linux (I have Sugar running under VirtualBox, and it's a neat and innovative OS), and has a number of innovative technologies, notably in the low power screen which is usable in sunlight, and the dustproof and waterproof keyboard.

One week on, and I've got to grips a bit more with the iPod Touch. 

• I don't like iTunes!  (but perhaps I will ge used to it)  It doesn't seem terribly intuitive to me.
• My digital music files live on a Linux box upstairs, and I stream them to the hifi via a Logitech Squeezebox.  As I reported in the last iPod post, I was able to access these files for use with iTunes using Firefly, but this wouldn't let my sync them to the iPod.  Samba wasn't a bundle of use either.
• Disk space being limited due to the small partition used for Windows XP on the only machine available for iTunes, I resorted to making copies to a portable hard drive, this worked pretty well.
• Why can't Apple make a Linux version of iTunes?
• iTunes could only identify cover art for a very small proportion of my mp3s.  This is probably more a reflection of my musical taste, however!
• To be honest, I don't find browing the album covers an efficient way of locating an album when thereis over 29Gb of music files on the device!
• Having access to the MS Exchange mail/calendar is very useful
• My grown up sized finger tips are a bit on the large size for accurate tapping on the screen keyboard!
  

Perhaps I should look into jailbreaking this iPod so I can just use the Linux box for transferring files...

Some recent developments regarding the obnoxious Phorm:

The Telco 2.0 conference feature discussions from the CEO of a web marketing company.   Because the meeting was held under Chatham House rules, individuals and companies could not be named.  However, it's a reasonable assumption this was someone from Phorm.  The Register reports.