On the face of it, the riders were presented with an appalling set of conditions - the warm and sunny weather we had for the previous week or two had vanished, replaced by cold and grey conditions, with a very strong wind and the threat of rain. To add to this, I had a real lack of enthusiasm and couldn't stop yawning as I lined up at the start.
Lynne had a TV interview with BBC Oxford yesterday, while I had a radio interview yesterday and another scheduled for tomorrow (broadcast for today and tomorrow respectively).
Our paper in Aging Cell describing the identification and characterisation of a Drosophila orthologue of the exonuclease function of WRN is now available online, and open access.
This was an afternoon event on the hottest day of the year so far, hot enough that I found it rather oppressive. By the finish, my HR had climbed to some pretty unreasonable levels.
Oktar runs a bizarre publishing enterprise that sends out huge and lavishly illustrated but bizarrely argued tomes vainly trying to discredit evolution. The strategy seems to be to compare fossils with extant species, claim no morphological difference between them, then state this proves evolution to be false. As a wild-eyed strategy this is rather amusing, such as the comparison of a spider crab with a spider. He is certainly taxonomically challenged. Perhaps I'll scan some examples later...I have a copy of one of these volumes that was sent to me a year ago...
He's been convicted of "creating an illegal organization for personal gain".
