Bizarrely, someone at the conference I was working at last week walked up to me and invited me to apply for a job here, despite my having told him to be quiet during a seminar that I later discovered he was co-chairing. He’s Australian; they have a different attitude to that kind of thing—and he asked quite a lot of attendees to apply for jobs with him during the course of that meeting.

It now turns out that The Centre For Life is so desperate for people that it has been given permission to start cloning them. The detail I love about this story is that Miodrag Stojkovic, one of the group leaders concerned, speaks with the sort of Mittel-European accent that most people would hear and associate with B-movie mad scientists. Wouldn’t it be fun if it was an elaborate hoax by a bunch of mischievous Geordies?

[Yes I am being flip about an extraordinary and potentially beneficial advance in science, but the truth is I’m lost for words. The alternative would be an Onion-style “Holy Crap! Man Walks On Moon!” piece and I haven’t got time for awe; I’ve got to go to work.]