Darq Knight: The Musical was written by Yale students Marshall Pailet and James Pollack with help from Tessa Williams, and Emma Barash. The plot follows the Dark Knight but strays to make jokes about the sexual tension felt by Alfred for Bruce and breaks for "With or Without You” anthems.

Just so you understand how truly hilarious this show must have been here is a "director's note" from the playbill:

“Darq Knight: The Musical” was once upon a time the brain lovechild of a midsummer coffee date between myself and Bono, and has quickly become the most important and influential work of our time. We feel the original Dark Knight text superimposed upon the insightful work of modern musical genius that is the epic 80’s rock cannon will not only entertain the masses, but also begin a dialogue on important and profound issues such as slavery, government, medicare, and of course the existence of God. And inform. Text.

The show ran last week at a local theater and let's hope that this press will convince them turn the bat light onto the stage one more time.

For more pictures check out the round up at Ivy Gate Blog.

Thanks Dan.

Tree of Life is an effort to construct a huge genetic family tree connecting all the life forms on Earth. Determining how long a species has been a species by comparing its molecular evolution to similar life forms is an important part of figuring out all those relationships. While studying this, the Yale team figured out that plants with very short generations (that is, with the shortest "seed to stem" time) had very high rates of molecular evolution. Large, woody plants that reproduced at a more stately pace were not as genetically varied from one and other. To anyone who understands natural selection, this doesn't come as a big surprise, but plants act a bit differently from animals in this regard, so patterns of plant evolutionary speed had been elusive.

What can we do with this information? For one thing, it will be a major boon to Tree of Life and other genetic cataloging projects. But jump forward 20 years. Imagine computers powerful enough to create a virtual plant based on a fully sequenced genome. Imagine running that plant through tens of thousands of generations (even plants that usually evolve slowly), with the ability to set the parameters within the virtual environment. Instead of genetically modifying a plant by tweaking a base pair here and there, you could create genomes customized to specific conditions, refined by all those iterations of natural selection. Sure, we don't have the ability to take the resulting virtual genome and make it into a living thing, but we might in 20 years.

Which is all well and good until the night janitor decides to run some virtual mice through a few million generations in an ultra-competitive environment filled with deadly predators, then manages to process the resulting MegaMice through the sequencing/cloning machine. Image by: ausiegall.

Key To Rapid Evolution In Plants: Reproduce Early And Often. [Science Daily]