Tomorrow's issue of Nature discusses the next steps in cancer research (subscription required for the full text):

A tumour cell is a genetic disaster area littered with mutations that differ not only from one type of cancer to the next, but from one patient to the next.... ...[which makes] new targeted drug therapies for cancer seem hopeless. And yet, the reality may be just the opposite. The richness of the data becoming available in these and other studies allows researchers to cut through the complexity. Genes work together in pathways of reactions to accomplish a particular biological function, such as cell division — and many or most of the mutated genes picked up by these cancer studies are involved in a comparatively small number of pathways. The Johns Hopkins team found that most of the mutations in their pancreatic tumours affected just 12 pathways. The Genome Atlas team found that most of its glioblastomas showed mutations in a set of three pathways. So drugs targeting these pathways might work in more patients than drugs that target only one of a pathway's myriad gene components.

If haven't yet listened to Ryan Gregory or Larry Moran (or me) on junk DNA, for the love of God, listen to Carl Zimmer before you ever use that term in a scientific paper, press release, or blog post! For some reason people like to set junk DNA up as a straw man, and pretend that every discovery of functional non-coding DNA is paradigm-shifting. Don't believe them!

Is it eavesdropping when your ISP sells your web surfing habits to advertisers? Lawyers and legislators are debating whether such practices violate the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, designed to keep phone companies for listening in on their customer's phone calls.

We know what's worse for your health (in case you were wondering: we know cigarettes cause cancer, and there is no reliable link between cell phones and cancer), but what about your sanity: Novelist Jonathan Franzen on cell phones:

Michael Shermer on why we're not really hard-wired for statistics:

Thanks to our confirmation bias, in which we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore or discount contradictory evidence, we will remember only those few astonishing coincidences and forget the vast sea of meaningless data.