Two scientists took to the pages of The Guardian yesterday to contend that their area of expertise, which has been called interpretative phyleogeography is not "genetic astrology," in response to another recent column which said that it may be.

According to Martin Richards, a professor of archaeogenetics at the University of Huddersfield, and Vincent Macaulay, a reader in statistics at the University of Glasgow, they engage in interpretative phyleogeography when they look to mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome to study the dispersal of humans.

They were responding to criticisms leveled by Mark Thomas, a professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London, in the same paper two months ago, in which he suggested that the genetic ancestry testing industry, and the media which has been enabling them, are mostly offering a load of hooey.

Thomas had taken the UK media to task for television shows like "Meet the Izzards," in which the ancestral genetics of comedian Eddie Izzard shows him to have a Viking descendant on his mum's side and an Anglo-Saxon on his fathers. Another example, he said, was the recent article in the Daily Telegraph which said that as many as 1 million British men may be directly descended from the Roman legions.

He also said that the results from the genetic ancestry testing products that some of these media reports are based on are convoluted by the complexity of the science.

"The truth is that there is usually little scientific substance to most of them and they are better thought of as genetic astrology," Thomas writes.

Thomas says that if anyone looks very far back in time they will find that they have more ancestors than they have sections of DNA, and that humans move around a lot, making predictions about lineages a difficult business.

If you go back around 5,000 years, he adds, you get to a point where either nearly everybody alive then was a common ancestor of nearly everyone alive today, or they were a common ancestor to no one alive today.

"Nobody is pure this, or pure that, and a substantial proportion of human ancestry is common to all of us. Ancestry is complicated and very messy," Thomas writes.

Richards and Macaulay agree that Thomas "may have a point in his critique of his genetic testing companies," but also say that there are real merits to linking genetics and geography to study ancestry.

Phylogeographers, they write, rely on "the principle that every mutation in the DNA arises at a specific point in space and time, and that a plot pinpointing these locations is effectively an outline of the movement of people across the landscape and around the world."

They also note that "the mitochondrial picture almost exactly matches the archaeological evidence for the colonization of the Remote Pacific, about 3,000 years ago," and that the same is true from the Bantu expansion in Africa.

"Hopefully, the point is made. There are enough archaeologically well-known cases of colonization to show that phylogeographic interpretations can work in principle," they write.

There are two general ways to go about managing a lab, says Vicki Doronina at Bitesize Bio. One she calls the seagull strategy while the other she dubs the commons strategy.

Seagulls, she writes, may live all together, but they don't hunt for food together. Rather, they scavenge food from each other. In the lab, such a management strategy leads to each person being self-reliant. Though, Doronina notes, it can lead to inefficient use of resources.

"Applying the seagull strategy (SGS) to the lab, each person develops their own SGS so that, at least in theory, everyone's work speed depends on their individual organization skills," she writes, adding that this approach also leads to "an environment where everybody spends time making the same reagents."

At the other end of the spectrum, then is the commons strategy in which such reagents and other stocks are communal property. However, Doronina points out that it is subject to the tragedy of the commons in which people use but do not contribute to the communal property. "However, this can be prevented by establishing a rota and applying peer pressure on colleagues who don't pull their weight," she adds.

She also notes that if researchers find themselves in a "seagull" lab, but want a "commons" one, they can always make a stock solution and encourage others to use it.

A growing number of open-access journals of questionable reputation are offering to publish "seemingly anything" for a fee and are preying on researchers to lend them credibility, The New York Times reports today.

One doctor who submitted two articles to The Journal of Clinical Case Reports was billed $2,900 for their publication, a fee he had not been told about. When he tried to withdraw the papers, they were published anyway, and his fee was waived after a year of back-and-forth.

A plant pathologist at Rutgers University agreed to join the editorial board of another journal, Plant Pathology & Microbiology, only to find himself listed by the publisher as an organizer and speaker for a conference called Entomology-2013."I am not even an entomologist," he told the Times. The conference is trying to mimic a well-known meeting called Entomology 2013.

Up to 4,000 such "predatory journals" exist today – at least a quarter of all open-access journals – according to Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado, who keeps a blacklist of them called "Beall's list."

The US Supreme Court recently heard arguments in Maryland v. King concerning whether obtaining DNA samples from people as they are arrested violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In The Nation, Jason Silverstein writes that a factor beyond privacy comes into play with the collection of DNA samples upon a person's arrest. "Because people of color are disproportionately stopped, searched and arrested, they will disproportionately bear the burden of this genetic dragnet," he writes. "And because DNA samples can be used to establish family relationships, it has the potential to widen the surveillance to entire communities."

Indeed, the Los Angeles Police Department has said that it was able to make an arrest in the 'Grim Sleeper' serial killer case because of a familial search. Christopher Franklin was arrested in conjunction with a weapons charge and his DNA test showed a similarity to samples from the serial killer case; his father Lonnie Franklin, Jr., was subsequently arrested and charged in the Grim Sleeper case.

However, Silverstein notes that such police DNA databases likely contain a significant portion of samples from people who were never convicted or sometimes even charged with a crime. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that about 19 percent of people arrested in California for a felony were never charged with a crime, Silverstein writes. Getting removed from the database is also difficult, with the procedures differing from state to state.

The Court is expected to rule on the case this summer. How the Court votes, Silverstein says, may be unusual. "When Maryland's chief deputy attorney general, Katherine Winfree, recited the number of convictions won through DNA matches, Justice Antonin Scalia fired back, 'If you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you'd get more convictions, too. That proves absolutely nothing.'" On the other hand, Justice Stephen Breyer pushed back against King's attorney, saying DNA tests are "no more intrusive" than fingerprints but "much more accurate."

The American Association for Cancer Research honored James Watson's 85th birthday at its annual meeting this weekend with a special session that included a round of "Happy Birthday to You" and a birthday cake.

After blowing out his candles, Watson spoke about his recent work investigating the hypothesis that antioxidants play a role in cancer. He published a paper earlier this year in Open Biology outlining his views on the subject, but apparently that journal wasn't his first choice.

He said during his talk on Saturday that he initially submitted the paper – his first since 1972 – to the New England Journal of Medicine, but was rejected because, he said he was told, NEJM "doesn't publish ideas, only facts." Several other journals also turned him down.

This experience, he said, led him to believe that journal publishers see it as their mission to reject papers rather than publish them. "I hate the editors of these journals more than I hate Republicans," he said. "They're anti-science."

He wrapped up by calling for a more concerted research effort into the role that antioxidants play in cancer, noting that the cancer research community can make faster progress if it considers new ideas. "We can do it if we don't spend all our money investigating RAS," he said.

Big science can lead to big reactions, and Greg Miller at Wired has put together a poll comparing reactions to the announcement of the Human Genome project to those in response to the new brain mapping initiative, conveniently called BRAIN.

"Today [the Human Genome Project] is widely viewed as a success, but in the early days it too was controversial," Miller writes. "Just because the critics of the genome project got it wrong doesn’t mean that the critics of the brain project aren't raising good points, but there's a similar ring to many of the arguments for and against the two projects."

For example, respondents to the poll split 48 to 52 that this phrase referred to the brain project or the genome project: "Arguments are made that the ... project will give birth to a new generation of technologies. What good will that do in the absence of individuals trained and capable of applying these technologies?"

For the answer, and more comparisons, take Miller's poll.