San Quentin, CA, USA. California’s next attorney general will have a full plate.

He or she will have to deal with a federal court challenge on prison overcrowding, a continuing battle over gay marriage, how to proceed if a marijuana-legalization ballot measure passes, and whether to follow other states in cracking down on illegal immigration and implementing, or challenging, the newly passed health care bill.

And all of this is in addition to the ordinary workload of judicial appeals, general litigation, and environmental and consumer protection cases.

In this historically Democratic state, the Democratic candidate for AG, a twice-elected San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris, is widely thought to face an uphill battle in November against Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley. In contrast to Cooley, who is an unambiguous supporter of the death penalty, Harris personally opposes capital punishment, typically favoring life without parole.

Leicester, England. Sir Alec Jeffreys, whose work led to the development of genetic fingerprinting, is the senior author of an important new paper on the genetic basis of human diversity.

The Jeffreys team has now defined the engine for change in genetic hotspots, one of the key drivers of human evolution and diversity, accounting for changes that occur between different generations of people.

Professor Jeffreys is the Royal Society Wolfson Research Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester.

Jeffreys has spent over two decades since his landmark discovery in 1984 investigating what he describes as "pretty bizarre bits of DNA" — highly variable repeated parts of DNA called minisatellites, short sequences of DNA which vary more, and at a faster rate, than most of the other DNA in the human genome.