A truly hostile takeover: Chinese pharmaceutical company, Sinovac, is going through some seriously bizarre times. According to reports, the chairman of one of its subsidiaries, Sinovac Beijing, has physically taken control of parts of the parent company. Backed up by a gang of goons, Aihua Pan marched into a building and refused to allow Sinovac employees to do their jobs. Since April 18, the building has been occupied by unnamed individuals. Pan also went after the company website, forcing Sinovac to temporarily take the entire site down. Can you imagine something like that happening in the States or Europe? Neither can I. This is a publicly listed company we’re talking about here. (SVA: NASDAQ $7.75 as of 2:15pm) http://bit.ly/2w57on8
Fist Full of Forgeries: A small art gallery in the south of France had a rude awakening. They discovered that more than half of their entire collection consisted of forgeries. Museé Terrus lacked the budget for a proper acquisitions department that, presumably, would perform due diligence on the artworks’ provenance. Instead, they had to rely on whatever the museum’s founder bequeathed. Needless to say, someone seriously got scammed. http://bit.ly/2w5ODQh
There’s more to Twitter than trolls: A recent study attempted to measure the degree of immigrant integration in 53 cities using an analysis of the spatio-temporal communication patterns of immigrant and local communities based on language detection in Twitter and on novel metrics of spatial integration. They hoped to develop a novel way of acquiring data beyond the more traditional and slowly updating census data. http://bit.ly/2jou4W3
A new approach to microbiomes: The Microbiome Interagency Workgroup, consisting of 23 U.S. government agencies, has proposed a Five-year Plan. It put forward three primary areas of focus: supporting interdisciplinary, collaborative research; developing platform technologies to generate critical insights and improve access to and sharing of microbiome data collected across ecosystems; and expanding the microbiome workforce through educational opportunities, citizen science and public engagement. http://bit.ly/2w5WfT1
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