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I can't speak for the whole of Europe but grant issuing bodies are certainly moving towards open access in the UK. For example, the Medical Research Council position statement says:

It is important that the availability and accessibility of this material is not adversely affected by the copyright, marketing and distribution strategies used by publishers...

The MRC therefore supports unrestricted access to the published outputs of research as a fundamental part of its mission and a public benefit, and this is encouraged wherever possible.

Indeed, and now that a reliable method of making stem cells WITHOUT KILLING has been invented.

Yes, precisely! There are proven stem cell treatments accomplished without killing human embryos:

• lab produced stem cells: http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC005642
• Adult stem cells: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS09A02

Here's an article abstract.

For the lazy, they tested his mitochondrial DNA (he turned out to be a member of mtDNA haplogroup A), and compared that to a number of living people. None of the 17 matches are his direct descendants, but have a common matrilineal ancestry.

Some comments in this thread about how this doesn't imply lamarckian evolution. However, there is some _other_ evidence in support of heredity of acquired changes. See: http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/millhillessays/2004/here dity/

Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?

Nah, more that I'm moving web hosts, and it would finally appear to be taking effect. The real site should be back up again sooner or later - but in the meantime, here's the MINERVA page on the Valve Developer Community.

Some download links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes, I'm using friends in UK academia for download bandwidth. But if old-fashioned HTTP isn't your thing, there's always BitTorrent...

Still, huge thanks for all the comments, and I guess I really should get back to the third and final part of Metastasis. (There will definitely be future chapters, so don't worry.)

(N.B.: Difficulty levels have been tweaked a bit, with an altered skill.cfg which monkeys around with the damage taken and inflicted by the enemies. Try loading standard HL2 maps through the console from MINERVA - it's like a whole different game.)

I lost my virginity at 12 and it was not at all my choice. Now we have two data point. Can we make any correlation on that ? One own experience does not allow any conclusion (isn't that the "post ergo" reasonement ??).

Now if we take STUDY they says us that A quarter of women and nearly a third of men have sex under the age of 16 (the age of sexual consent) but the average age at first sexual intercourse is 16 for both sexes
Quote from Study on sex in UK

This is UK, but I doubt the average US teenie is less interrested by sex so I take it in the US it is the same, since I could not readily find an equivalent study for US very quick.

See relevant web pages from the UK Medical Research Council, the UK Department of Health, the NIBSC and Cambridge University's Stem Cell Institute.

Research in this area is also being conducted by the UK universities of Bath and Liverpool, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and Smith & Nephew.

Actually, having a positive outlook has no tangible medical benefit. I'd also be interested to know what statistics you are referring to; is there enough evidence to show causality (religin makes people happier v happy people tend to be drawn to religion)? Apparently, religious people are more likley to be obsessive compulsive than non-religious people (see this article for a random report of this study), although the causality is indeterminate.

As for the narnia books, I enjoyed them very much when I was young, but the Christian allegory was entirely lost on me, until perhaps the last battle (much the worst of the books, as I thought even at the time), where Aslan says something like "In your world, I go by a diffrent name", and I suspect this reading of the books - as straight fantasy - is rather common. After all, children seem to have an inherent (or at least quickly endowed) sense of right and wrong, and one may interpret the events from that standpoint without taking the religious interpretation that Lewis was trying to push. In fact, knowing that the books were written with the idea of indoctrinating children into the Christian faith has rather spoilt them for me; I can no longer view them as a simple and exciting set of stories written by someone who understood children, like one can with Roald dahl, say, but as a more cynical affair designed to exploit their thirst for stories. Fortunatley, I don't think that really works, except perhaps where the children already have been introduced to the religious stories themselves. However these films might be good so long as they tell the story rather than trying to tell the religion.

Here is a very simple trawl of BBC news over the past couple of months:

A link here (about MS), another here (about Alzheimer), another here about epileptics, some say it kills pain, oh, and here is something saying it may be available with a year. And this is a very simple search of the BBc website. How about searching the medical research council or even the medicine department of your local college.

This amount of material in (a tiny section of) the public domain being "virtually no studies to base any conclusions on" is just false. Medical studies take time but there are plenty being done.

Don't take the cr4p commercial providers throw at you, they want you to think they and you are right and everything else is wrong, so you trust and follow them more. Don't be a fool.

STFU etc etc, nice to copy another's sign-ogg, isn't it? And here I could be talking about important things like Gentoo.

It's good that hackers are well-informed and principled enough to think it matters. This happens to be my area of interest; I'm responsible for Bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer Research in the UK. A couple of weeks back I went to an excellent talk by a clever guy call Ewan Birney from the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, UK. He is writing code to catalogue and annotate the assembled sequences in real time as they come off the mammoth robot sequencing "production line". In one of those rare occasions where the British are leading a "big science" project the Centre has been responsible for the largest fraction of the Human Genome sequenced at any single institute. The code does stuff like figure out which bits of the sequence are real genes and which bits are that 90%+ of so-called "junk DNA" you might have heard of and also attempts to assign provisional functions to the genes by various computational means. Eventually people in white coats will have to confirm such assignments properly, but it's important to beat the drug companies to making good guesses.

Ewan's code and all the data are entirely Open Source. If you've got a good reason and a reasonable Pentium with lots of memory and a 30Gb hard disk you could mirror the human genome and get it updated every night. (I feel strange just typing that sentence and I've been following this story for years). The Wellcome Trust and others (including US and European government agencies) funding the project are keeping everything Open because that's the way science is done and because this will subvert commercial attempts to stake a claim on our species' genetic heritage. (Er, go Wellcome!)

Biochemists often talk about the "rate limiting step" in a reaction---the single point which sets the speed of the whole process---like a bottleneck. As far as I understood Ewan's talk (if you're reading this Ewan, please put me right), the rate-limiting step with the Genome Project isn't the assembly of the sequenced stretches of DNA (or "contigs") as the original poster suggests, but the collection of the data in the first place. At the Sanger they have clusters of PCs and Alphas crunching the contigs---distributing the effort would give us all a warm fuzzy feeling, but wouldn't be essential. Again, I may be wrong about this.

One thing that definitely is a priority is making some sense out of all of this information. What would be great would be if members of the global community of hackers started taking molecular biology and biochemistry classes so they could write code to help people like me make sense of the embarrassment of riches that the project is creating. I'm off to Cambridge in two weeks to the Bioinformatics Open Software Development meeting to listen to some project leaders talk and discuss the existing efforts. Personally, I would love to give crash courses in biology to programmers with time on their hands in an effort to harness their collective genius rather than sponsor an effort to write a contig-crunching client to harness their collective spare cycles, but I have no idea how such a thing could be organised. Any ideas?