From the literature batch…

A random sample of things from this week’s scientific news I think are worth sharing:

Britain is apparently shutting down many of its climate change outreach efforts. I find this very saddening, and see it as an indication of our extreme short-sightedness. We need to put more effort and funding into preserving the environment – not less. In addition, the economic benefits of taking care of the nature around us will probably be much larger than the small sums we save in the short term by not doing anything. We clearly need better incentives to look beyond the next budget and the next election.

The editorial of Nature Reviews Microbiology points the torch on the need for research within basic microbiology, pointing out that “the functions of many genes in the genomes of even the best studied organisms, such as Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, remain unknown. Often these genes do not resemble other, characterized, genes in the databases, allowing for the possibility that interesting new pathways remain to be discovered. (…) if we want to understand how life works at the molecular level, it is crucial to continue and expand basic microbiology research.” I would like to add that a more complete understanding of at least one model organism would drastically increase the accuracy of genome (and metagenome) annotation in new sequencing projects, which today is patchy, to say the least.