Hungry for science news?

Are you ravenous for information? Today’s issue of Nature announces that Nature has created a central science news service, news@nature.com. Anyone with a subscription to any Nature journal (or a university subscription) can access all of the news, anyone at all can subscribe to the free daily news service, and everyone can try the whole thing out for free for two months at http://www.nature.com/news.

It’s quite handy. Just today I discovered that adaptive immune systems have evolved not once, but at least twice – once in the jawed vertebrates, and again, in an entirely different way, in their sister group, the lampreys (left). You may recall that Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe listed the adaptive immune system as one of several “irreducibly complex” systems that supposedly scientists had no idea how to explain with evolution. This was debunked in rather excruciating detail a few years ago, but it is worth pointing out that every month brings out new discoveries filling in details on the evolution of the vertebrate immune system.