Two Congressmen introduced bipartisan legislation to address prescription drug shortages last week.?? The Drug Shortage Prevention Act would create a 'Critical Drug List' that would identify drugs that are susceptible to shortage, and require the FDA to develop a system to notify the public if a medicine is added to the list. The bill would ...

The Guardian | Not withstanding the famous 2005 Pennsylvania court ruling on intelligent design, anti-evolution campaigners in the United States are now combining with climate change deniers to continue to undermine public education.

Bio-IT World | In a study published online in Nature Biotechnology, BGI researchers have reported evidence of extensive RNA editing in human cells. The paper is a follow up study to last May's Science paper that initially reported sequence differences between mRNA and DNA.

Forbes | Forbes' posted a new estimate of how much it costs pharmaceutical companies to bring a new drug to market. The result: between $4 and $11 billion per drug, far more than any previous estimate.

Motley Fool | Illumina has rejected Roche's most recent offer, and earlier in the week released fourth-quarter numbers that were a bit less than last year's, but still expected.

As cloud computing adoption rates soar, standards groups see promise with establishing aligned interfaces, rules written into RFPs and SLAs, and harmonized government legislation.

Orlando Sentinel | Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Florida Hospital and Moffitt Cancer Center have teamed to create Personalized Medicine Partnership of Florida.

Forbes | With the $1,000 genomic sequencing barrier looming, the question remains whether we'll be able to make sense of the data to come pouring off sequencers like Life Technologies' new Ion Proton Sequencer.

Xconomy | The New York Genome Center will open this month, and the New York eHealth Collaborative held its first conference last year. It's been a season of collaboration for scientific organizations in the New York area.

San Diego Source | A new PricewaterhouseCoopers report shows that three of the top 10 California recipients of National Institutes of Health grants were in the San Diego area.

GlaxoSmithKline has announced that it will invest about $64 million to expand its manufacturing and new drug development activities in Melbourne, Australia. The investment by one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies will create 58 new highly-skilled jobs by 2017.

Bio-IT World | This summer, Foundation Medicine will launch what could be described as the next generation of cancer diagnostics. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, founded by a premier group of cancer researchers and funded by Third Rock Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures, will launch a comprehensive next-gen sequencing (NGS) profile screening some about 200 genes known to be clinically relevant and actionable in cancer using routine, formalin-fixed paraffin embedded patient cancer specimens.

Bio-IT World | While many major pharma companies have been cutting back their research into natural products, Warp Drive Bio, a new start-up out of Third Rock Ventures in Boston, is dedicated to mining the genome of micro-organisms for potent natural product compounds. And in a striking $125-million deal, Warp Drive has teamed with Sanofi to provide ample funding to get operations off the ground and potentially into orbit.

Open source vendor Red Hat today rolled out its Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services, which it said "enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud."

Is a data center built into a standard 20-foot shipping container on your shopping list, cloud service providers? That's the question some are asking as these portable data centers, pioneered by Sun with its Project Blackbox (later dubbed Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD), enter their sixth year of commercial availability.

Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends, such as Oozie, Zookeeper and Flume?