Okay. After months and months of valiant, if somewhat curmudgeony, resistance, I gave in and joined a modest – but   steadily growing! – circle of friends in the grand, utopian shared consciousness that is Facebook.

For years researchers have been refining methods for recruiting viruses in the fight against cancer. The idea is to harness the harmful effects some viruses exert on host cells and unleash these effects on cancer cells. Typically, a virus is harmful when it replicates to a large number within a cell. Eventually the cell ruptures, spilling viruses which invade surrounding cells, continuing the process. A virus which kills cancer cells very efficiently while sparing normal cells could have great therapeutic potential.

As headlines continue to warn of a looming H1N1 influenza pandemic, biologists at the Yale University School of Medicine are applying evolutionary theory to fundamental questions in epidemiology.

In a paper published May 1 in the journal BMC Biology, researchers at Iowa State University and Brigham Young University provide fresh insights into genomic mechanisms that may lie at the root of the spectacular evolutionary success and diversity of flowering plants.

At low tide, a female fiddler crab (Uca perplexa) cruises the beach in search of a suitable mate. When she spots a reasonably attractive male, she approaches for a closer look. Encouraged, the male treats her to a bit of the old I’m too sexy for my shell. That is, he engages in a display. He flaunts his desirability as a mate by waving his greatly over-sized major claw – raising it high and lowering it several times. If the female is impressed, she will enter his burrow, inspect it, and perhaps mate with him. If not, she passes him by. Female crabs tend to approach larger than average males, and there is evidence that females respond specifically to the size of the major claw.

Nature may well be "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson famously summarized the struggle to exist in a brutal world. With all due respect to the poet, though – it ain’t exactly easy being green. Don’t let the stoic serenity of the noble branch mislead you; it’s a hard life for plants, too – facing competition for resources from neighboring plants, predation by herbivores, infestation by parasites, exposure to disease, and the vagaries of weather. Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that a plant will take any advantage it can get - or more accurately, that natural selection will favor individual plants that possess advantageous traits.

Biologists have discovered a beneficial and previously unknown function for what not too long ago might have been mistaken for a marauding horde of unrepentant genomic interlopers.

I’m referring, of course, to those near-ubiquitous hangers-on of the eukaryotic genome – the transposons. Transposons (aka transposable elements, TEs) are mobile DNA sequences – jumping genes – which encode proteins capable of catalyzing their excision from a chromosome and subsequent transplantation at a brand new genomic abode. (That’s assuming the rogue didn’t kill its cellular host by jumping smack-dab into the middle of, say, a housekeeping gene, thereby disrupting the amino acid sequence – and function - of its encoded protein.)

Suppose I give you $10. Wait. Don’t spend it yet. Suppose I give you $10 – and an opportunity to do a good deed. Let’s say you have the option of sharing the windfall with an anonymous stranger, waiting in the next room. How much do you slip under the door? Five dollars? One dollar? An empty envelope?