My real life has swamped my online one recently, and so I failed to note that the 16th Carnival of Evolution is up at the excellent blog Pleiotropy. Bjørn has managed to collect 50,228 words of blogging about evolution, covering the human brain, man-eating birds, child-eating eagles, sperm wars, evolving views on selfish genes, true sexual reproduction for same-sex couples, and much more.

Last week it was Science, with a swath of Ardipithecus papers. This week Nature has an above-average issue. I can't vouch for the quality of the papers (since I havent' finished them yet), but these look interesting (subscription required, unfortunately):

- Craig Venter and some distinguished colleagued offer "An agenda for personalized medicine.".

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability.

Three deserving, outstanding scientists have won the Nobel of medicine. As a footnote, Blackburn's outstanding career has included dismissal from Bush II's bioethics committee over her dissent on the Bush administration's stem cell policy. Telomore biology is interesting and important and relevant to cancer, but personally I think Jack Szostak's work on the origins of life is even more interesting. On my hard drive I've got a folder labeled 'Szostak', whose contents include these interesting studies: 'Synthesizing Life' (a review, subscription required)

For all of you postdocs who worry about an uncertain future, endure low pay, fret about getting stuck on uninspiring research, then you might take heart from the example of Francis Crick. In late 1953, at the age of 37, Francis Crick began his postdoc in the United States at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he was supposed to work on X-ray crystallography studies of ribonuclease: