Returned from Massachusetts

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/evolution-is-happening-faster-than-we-thought.html?_r=0
This is an article from NYT by a writer named  Menno Schilthuizen (wrote Nature's Nether Parts) about evolution in cities. He cites research done at Fordham U, Vienna and Paris.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/science/last-universal-ancestor.html?_r=0
This is a commentary by Nicholas Wade in the NYT about the emergence of all living things and the living ancestor, abbreviated as LUCA. It mentions work done at Heinrich Heine University on bacterial and archaeal domain. Comparing genes in organisms pointed to 355 genes ascribable to this common ancestor. The research is to be published in Nature Microbiology. 
 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/swapping-analogous-genes-no-problem-among-species From  Science News, a report of the swapping of analogous genes between plants, yeasts and bacteria. This work was done at the University of Texas at Austin and reported at the Allied Genetics Conference. In unpublished work, the team was able to exchange 60% of E.coli genes with yeast counterparts.





https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-funds-precision-medicine-research-focus-health-disparities Here is a report of the funding by NIH of the NIMHD, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities to develop new tools using pharmacogenomics to identify health disparities and to translate those disparities into tools for use in clinical practice. There will also be set up TCCs, which are Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers to  make use of these findings.


http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/446.full.pdf+html Article in Science mag about plant extinction. The State of the World's Plants is a publication of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew and predicts that 50,000 of the world's 390,000 vascular plants are at risk for extinction. It was expected in the 1990s that up to 30,000 would have been extinct by 2015. But there may be undocumented extinctions and there may be a long "extinction lag time."