Wired | Studies published in Nature and Science have begun to shed light on the "activities of the cell," says Peter Park.

Nature News | Set your genome free on the internet, and it might come back to you with some surprising interpretations. Projects such as the Dodecad Ancestry Project and the Eurogenes Ancestry Project are analyzing personal ancestry and human population history and reporting the findings online.

HHMI | The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has launched an international competition to select up to 35 early career scientists working at academic institutions in 18 countries on five continents with the goal of helping these talented individuals establish independent research programs.

Vanity Fair | As more clinical trials move overseas, are the results of those trials applicable to Americans? Are they safe? Vanity Fair argues that overseas trials are beyond the reach of FDA and are conducted where "regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves."

Bio-IT World | Panasonic and imec have announced components of a lab-on-a-chip sensor enabling SNP detection. The technology was presented this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco and included  various a miniaturized pump for on-chip generation of high pressures, a micropillar filter optimized for DNA separation achieving world-record resolution, and a SNP detector allowing on-chip detection using very small sample volumes.

Xconomy | Complete Genomics is amping up its efforts to sequence cancer genomes. As an addition to its $10,000 sequencing service, the company plans to run basic computational analysis for all the copy number variations, and structural variations in tumors at no extra cost.

Bio-IT World | Researchers at the Broad Institute have released MSigDB 3.0, the most comprehensive molecular signatures database to date. MSigDB is a database of annotated gene sets that has become a standard tool for gaining insights from the results of genomic studies.

Reuters | Pfizer CEO, Jeffrey Kindler, retired unexpectedly the company announced late on Sunday. He is being replaced by the gobal head of pharmaceuticals, Ian Read.

Bio-IT World | New research from Mark Akeson and colleagues at UCSC shows that the decade long goal of sequencing DNA by passing an intact single strand of DNA through a protein nanopore is edging closer to reality. 

Bio-IT World | A pattern-matching puzzle created by bioinformaticians at McGill University lets players sort genetic code. The game, called Phylo, takes advantage of the human brain's efficiency at recognizing and sorting patterns to tackle multiple sequence alignments.

San Diego Union Tribune | Life science companies are irked by the FDA's lengthy drug review process, increasing fees, and issues raised late in the process according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey released yesterday.

Bio-IT World | SINGAPORE—The Moorea Biocode Project, a species inventory of the island of Moorea, is making publicly available its LIMS as a free beta version. The Moorea Biocode Project aims to create a comprehensive inventory of all of the coral reef and terrestrial species on Moorea larger than a microbe. The Biocode LIMS and data analysis components of the project were developed by Biomatters in collaboration with the Biocode Project researchers as a plugin for Biomatters’ Geneious Pro sequence analysis software.