Do you know what is a neural network? Find out here.

Commonly, gene transfer is thought of as a vertical line from parent to offspring, along which all evolutionary traits are passed. However, as we began delving into genomic sequences, we found that this may not be true and that the lines between "species," especially on the microbial level, are quite fuzzy.

When Drew Endy envisions the future, he sees giant gourds engineered to grow into four-bedroom, two-bathroom houses. He sees people alerted to nascent tumors in their bodies by internal biological sensors, and cars fueled by bacteria-produced gasoline. Endy, 37, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field that combines biology, chemistry, and engineering to remake biological systems to act according to human design. In other words, he’s a little like God, if God were a geek.

An important part of the admission process to a competitive college is the admissions interview. I'm against it. And that isn't just because interviews were originally instituted to keep Jews out of Harvard. It's because they are poor predictors of future performance and, even worse, they are poor predictors that people weight very heavily.

A data recovery company has retrieved 99% of the data from a hard drive recovered from the space shuttle Columbia crash in 2003, reports Computerworld.

Flowers "wave" in the breeze on long stalks to attract passing insects, reports BBC News.

Help settle a scientific argument between father and son!

The always-confusing avian-reptile-mammal playtpus has had its genome sequenced, according to a report by the BBC.

I won't have time to post the latest newsletter for the Science Shelf Book Review Archive or mail it to subscribers for a few days, but here's a link.

Read on for a bit more.

Losses loom larger than gains. This useful mnemonic describes an odd experimental finding: if you have people rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how unhappy they would be to lose $100, that rating will be higher than if you ask them how happy they would be to win $100.

Produce borne diseases have recently been gracing the front pages of our media. Our spinach has E. coli, our onions have Hepatitis A virus and E. coli, our strawberries have Listeria, and our tomatoes and peanut butter have Salmonella. Not to mention the countless tons of ground beef tainted with pathogenic E. coli.

A biosimilar protein that can be used to treat neutropenia (a side effect of cancer chemotherapy) is to be developed by Apotex Inc. of Canada in collaboration with Intas Biopharmaceuticals Limited (IBPL). Neukine (R), a recombinant granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) is already manufactured and marketed in India by IBPL. Kwizda Pharma of Austria had been working with IBPL to develop G-CSF for the European market for some time. Effectively immediately, Kwizda Pharma has transferred all of its rights in IBPL's G-CSF to Apotex. Apotex and IBPL have concurrently agreed to extend the collaboration to development of G-CSF for North America (US and Canada).

SPACE BOOMERANG!

Video games and iPods, among other things, have been purchased by NASA employees abusing their government-issued credit cards, reports the Houston Chronicle.

Anatoly Logunov has set out a relativistic theory of gravity that is not the same as the orthodoxy of the "general theory of relativity". What do we make of this?