In the previous post, I noted that a chemistry publisher is about to repeat an earlier experiment in serving pre-prints of journal articles. It would be fair to suggest that following the first great period of journal innovation, the boom in rapid publication “camera-ready” articles in the 1960s, the next period of rapid innovation started around 1994 driven by the uptake of the World-Wide-Web.

„Was ist uns Musik noch Wert?“ Dank MP3 und Streaming ist sie jederzeit verfügbar und wir hören so viel davon wie nie zuvor: in der U‑Bahn, zuhause auf der Couch oder auf dem Laufband im Fitnessstudio. Und doch haben Musiker und Labels große Schwierigkeiten sich zu finanzieren.

Das Phänomen „Shanzhai“ steht für die blühende Fälschungsindustrie, die in den chinesischen Produktionsstätten rund um die Stadt Shenzhen entstanden ist. Während einerseits die Verletzung geistigen Eigentums beklagt wird, zeigt die rasend schnelle und kundenorientierte Innovationsdynamik zugleich, wie Produktdesign in Zukunft aussehen kann.

Die Bundesregierung will das Geschmacksmusterrecht reformieren, Verbraucherschützer klagen gegen Paypal, Polizei und Staatsanwaltschaft gehen gegen einen mutmaßlichen Uploader von kino.to vor. Außerdem im Wochenrückblick: Die Telekom antwortet dem Kartellamt zur Drosselung, die BGH-Entscheidung zu Autocomplete ist veröffentlicht.

In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was.

The folks at the Discovery Institute (DI) are engaged in an extensive attempt to rebut my friend Dennis Venema's critiques of Stephen Meyer's surprisingly lame ID manifesto, Signature in the Cell . There are several aspects of this conversation that I hope to address in the coming days and weeks, but one jumped out at me today: the consistent confusion about natural selection in depictions of evolutionary theory by design advocates.

Last month I had an interesting conversation with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (DI), at Evolution News and Views (ENV), a DI blog/site that recently opened some articles to comments. The topic of the original post was common ancestry in humans and other primates, but Casey and I discussed various aspects of design thought. One subject that came up was the falsifiability of design.

So, Alu elements are mobile DNA modules that can exert diverse influences on genomes and the organisms harboring them. They can affect genome function in constructive ways, by altering gene expression or supporting chromosome structure. And they can be damaging, even deadly. There are more than a million of them in the human genome, and we don't know what each one does.

One of the goals of the intelligent design (ID) movement is to show that evolution cannot be random and/or unguided, and one way to demonstrate this is to show that an evolutionary transition is impossibly unlikely without guidance or intervention. Michael Behe has attempted to do this, without success. And Doug Axe, the director of Biologic Institute, is working on a similar problem.

So why is it that I and many other biologists hypothesize that introns are mostly non-functional? (I'll assume that you've read the previous posts, and that you understand what it is that I mean when I challenge claims that introns are functional elements in an information-rich genome.